Recipe Review: My first IIPA, a Flower Power clone

I'm stoked to be brewing my first home-made recipe using Ithaca's Flower Power IPA (my current favorite) as a template.

Here's the recipe, supplies are bought and ready! Let me know what you think:

Malt:
6# Briess Pilsen Light DME
2# Honey Malt
1# Crystal 60

Boil:
1.0 Columbus @ 60 min
1.25 Cascade @ 45 min
.75 Cascade @ 30 min
1.0 Ahtanum @ 15 min
1.0 Ahtanum @ 1 min

Dry Hop:
1.0 Amarillo 7 days
1.0 Simcoe 7 days
1.0 Centennial 7 days

Estimates are:
OG 1.071
FG 1.020
ABV 6.8%
IBU 69.3
Color 13 SRM

I've got a Safale US-05 dry ale yeast and plan on steeping the honey grain and crystal 60 for 35 min @ 150-165 degrees.

Any opinions out there?

Wow, no one cares huh? Just kidding.

So here's the update so far, for those who love hops:

Brewday looked like this:

Brought friends over, ordered pizza.
Turned on burner at 4:30pm

Steeped 2# honey malt and 1# crystal malt for 30 min at 158 degrees.

Added 6# Briess Pilsen Light DME.

Boil:
1.0 Columbus (14.4%) @ 60 min
1.0 Cascade (5.0%) @ 30 min
1.0 Cascade (5.0%) @ 30 min
1.0 Ahtanum (5.0%) @ 10 min
1.0 Ahtanum (5.0%) @ 1 min

Holy GOD it smelled great!

Dry Hop:
1.0 Amarillo (10.8%) 7 days
1.0 Simcoe (9.7%) 7 days
1.0 Centennial (12.2%) 7 days

At time of bottle, it smelled EXACTLY like Flower Power!

OG 1.062 (surprisingly low)
FG 1.020
ABV 5.6%
IBU (est) 69.3
Color (est) 13 SRM

Tonight, a week after bottling, I open test bottle no. 1. ... Yes it's early, but in order to assuage my natural inclination to rip the cap off bottle after bottle during the aging process, I've started to mark three bottles as "Testers". One at 1 week, one at 2 weeks, one at 3 weeks.

I will absolutely post during the tasting!

This is a 5 gallon recipe? Hoppy beers often lose a bit of extract due to hop absorption, but I think your math was off. 6 lbs of LME will get you ~1.045, and even at 70% efficiency 3 lbs of grain will only get you another .015 or so.

Looks solid, although with the honey malt and high FG you will probably be a bit sweeter than most IPAs.

I just did an IPA with Simcoe/Amarillo/Centennial, great combo.

Week 1: It's good!

The aroma is strong on the pour, though it fades halfway through the glass. The taste, while it needs aging and blending, is hoppy, sweeter than I might like, but definitely an IPA.

@Oldstock: the OG and FG were hydrometer readings compensated for temp. The math I got on the estimate of 1.071 was from hopville.com's beer calculus. I thought it to be high, but who am I to question?

I'll post again next week on my week 2 bottle.

I love beer!

Glad to hear it came out well.

I had misread DME as LME from your first post, sorry.

Did you change the default efficiency? Steeping will usually get much lower than their default 75%. 50% would probably be a better guess.

When I brew a really hoppy beer I set my target volume to 5.5 gallons to compensate for the loss to the hops.

With those two changes I get 1.060 as the target OG using Beer Calculus.

In the future less honey/crystal malt, and maybe a bit of table sugar will get you a drier beer.

Congrats, nice color.

Right now I have a brown IPA in my primary. I used 8# pale malt and then mini mashed 3.5# of grains.

My OG was 1.065. Personally I thought it was low, but I'm rather inexperienced.

This recipe looks more like an IPA to me. I've never had Flower Power but those hop amounts aren't even close to the typical IIPA recipes. Usually you're looking at 3-6oz of finishing hops, a higher OG, and a lot more bitterness.

Hell, Green Flash's West Coast IPA has more bitterness, alcohol, and hops than this beer. IF you're planning on entering in competition, I'd definitely go IPA on this one.

Ithaca Flower Power is one of my favorites! I think you might be just a little low in your IBU's since most sites have FP around the mid 70's. I'll have to pour another one tonight, but your color looks pretty darn close. They also have an advertised ABV of 7.5, so you look a little low there too. It is definitely an IPA, not a IIPPA, but it's towards the upper end of the style. In the end, as long as you have a beer that you created that tastes great......who cares......if you really wanted an exact match to FP, you could just buy it. Nice job!!

Thanks guys! Yeah, I got way off track on my gravities and IBU's... I don't quite know what happened. Here's the link to my hopville calculations: http://hopville.com/recipe/514266/imperial-ipa-recipes/flower-power-clone.

Either way, like MW66 says, it's beer, and it's good! (And let me remind you, it's only been in bottle a week!)

Alright, yes. I reworked my numbers on hopville here with 50% efficiency on the steep and 8# DME, with longer boil times. That aught to get me that second "I".

Guess I need to brew 5 more gallons... oh darn.