stout recipe looking for feedback

I am brewing a stout recipe tonight from papazians book, toad spit stout but i was going to change a few things. one thing is they dont sell john bull any more, and the other is i thought his recipe looked to bitter. I dont want it to be over powering bitter, just enough to balance out the strong malt addition with a little bitter bite. so if you dont mind to give me input i would appreciate very much...thanks
Papazian's Recipe:

3.3 lbs. John Bull hopped dark malt LME
4 lbs Dark DME
.75 lbs crystal malt
.33 lbs roasted barley
.33 lbs black patent
1.5 oz whole Northern brewer (60 min)
.5 oz whole Fuggles (10 min boil)
8 tsp gypsum
Irish ale yeast
.75 cups priming sugar
He only uses 1.5 gal of water to boil with (Im worried about scorching with that much malt)

Mine:
3.3 lbs unhopped muntons dark LME
4 lbs DME
.75 lbs crystal malt 120l
6 oz roasted barley
6 oz black patent
4 oz malto dextrin
1 oz Nothern Brewer pellet hops (60 min boil)
.5 oz willamette pellet hops (60 min)
.5 oz Fuggles pellets hops (10 min)
1 tsp gypsum
irish ale yeast wlp004
.75 cups priming sugar
and boil with 3 gallons of water

Lower the roasted and black patent back down to the original recipe. I think people sometimes underestimate these malts. They are very potent. Otherwise...looks okay.

Suthrncomfrt1884 said:

Lower the roasted and black patent back down to the original recipe. I think people sometimes underestimate these malts. They are very potent. Otherwise...looks okay.

Click to expand...

+1 I would lower the black malt for sure, but that's just me. Can be over powering

IF there is any way for you to avoid using the dark malt extract, I would. You don't really know what grains went into the dark extracts, so it is usually best to use the light or xtra light extracts, which you pretty much know are just from pale ale malt. You then build your own color and flavor profile by selecting the specialty grains yourself. You have much more control this way.

Looks like you are doing a steep with the specialty grains. Based on this recipe calculator, it looks like you have enough dark malt in the steep to get you to 31 SRM, which is a nice black color. Although, I haven't done an extract with steep in some time so I'm not sure if you get all the color as you would from mashing. Someone else here should know though.

Thanks for the input i will stay closer to the original recipe on the black patent and roasted barley. I am going to go AG soon, about a couple of months...waiting to set up the equipment, and cant wait.

Looks fine to me. Although I probably wouldn't use the Willamettes at 60 min. It won't hurt anything, but you're not going to get any flavor out of them, and not much bitterness either (since Willamette is a lower AA%).