Advice on strong belgian/cru recipe

Ok so i originally set out to make my version or a nice strong belgian cru. this is the recipe i devised:

Steeping grains: (45 min)

1/2 lb pail crystal malt
1 1/2 lb Cara Vienne

Extract BOil wort ( 60min )
6 lb LME
1 lb dry lme
2 lb dark lme
2lb candi sugar

hops/flavoring:

2 oz of chinook bittering
1 oz bitter orange peel w/bettering
1/2 oz sweet orange peel with aroma
1 oz corriander w/aroma
1 oz hallertau aroma.

fermented with whitelabs abbey ale yeast

Unfortunately this wont have the depth of color and maltiness usually found in Cru's due to the fact that there was no dark lme available at my homebrew supply store so i just opted to add 2lb of light dry malt to keep my alc up and make it nice and strong.


So here are some questions:

1 how does the recipe sound
2 is this much chinook at 12% alpha too hoppy for a belgian? I know they arent huge hop bears but i gotta balance my sweet with some bitter to drink it. I am leanign more to just 1 maybe 1.5 oz of chinook. the hallertau definately stays. Ever since i tried a buddies kolsch with this aroma i have been dying to use it. The chinook was just my american spin on a euro classic.
3 is this much light lme gonna work... will it be too sweet too alcoholic?
4 how long should i condition it. I am prepared to wait 8 weeks in the bottle, before i bust it out. I sure hope that is enough time.

Let me know what yall think and and all input will be very appreciated

Your yeast is right on. The last belgian I made I used that yeast and loved it (make a starter), it's going to be my standard for all my dubbels and trippels from now on. That yeast likes it fairly warm (about 70°) and give it plenty of time to ferment, like a month or so. 5 weeks in primary, 2 weeks in secondary (cold crash for about a week of that) and 2 weeks in bottle.

In your specialty grains, you may want to add 1-1.5 lbs of Special B. That's a common adjunct in most dubbels. It helps give it the very distinct Belgian Dubbel flavor.

You are right, belgians don't have a big hoppy nose or taste. I think the standard belgian hop tend to be the noble hops (saaz, hallertau, tetnanger, etc) so you might want to stick with them. With belgians like that, you don't really need a ton of hops to balance the sweetness, because you don't end up with a lot of sweetness. True, it has a decent-sized grain bill, but the bulk of the gravity comes from the addition of pure sugars (candi, table, brown etc). Those sugars really help dry out the beer and keep the body light. I would use three ounces of hallertau. 1 oz at start, middle and end (15 min).

Also, instead of just candi sugar, try cutting the candi sugar in half and sub out with light brown sugar. Then, reserve the other candi sugar and add it periodically throughout the primary.

The corriander, and orange peels really might not add that much, but if you want to add them, make sure the corriander is crushed and add at flame-out.

You have the same thread going in two sections MA120. One of the mods will be right along to delete this post of mine and straighten you out.