Feedback on my English Barley Wine recipe

I'm pretty new to the whole recipe creation bit, but I haven't found an English barley wine recipe that strikes me as being quite what I want. I'm aiming for a copper colored, full bodied barley wine that's malty and sweet with enough spicy bitterness to still be balanced. I can only mash about 10-12 pounds of grain, so I'm doing a partial. Here's what I've come up with using beer calculus:

Ingredients:
6 lbs pale extract
8 lbs Two-row pale
1 lb Munich
1 lb Crystal 60L
0.5 lb Cara-pils

1 oz Magnum, 14 AAU - 60 min
0.5 oz Tomahawk, 16 AAU - 60 min
0.5 oz Tomahawk - 15 min
0.5 oz Chinook, 13 AAU - 15 min
1 oz Chinook - 1 min
1.5 oz Chinook - dry hop in secondary

Yeast is a cake of WLP007 from an English brown that's finishing up as I type.

Estimates
OG - 1.112
FG - 1.028 (hopefully a little lower with the big starter)
Color - 13 SRM
IBU - About 70
ABV - 11.2%

Consider replacing 2 lbs of 2-row with brown sugar if you really want a lower finish.

A long mash at 150F would also help, as the extract will give you plenty of unfermentables.

For it to be an 'English' Barley wine, you may want to try some British hops. Chinook is far from English, and to me is too dominant.

big supper said:

For it to be an 'English' Barley wine, you may want to try some British hops. Chinook is far from English, and to me is too dominant.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I thought about that, but I'm not really hung up on the style. I want a pretty bold spicy hops profile.

Never used Tomahawk (aka Columbus aka Zeus), but I wouldn't have thought it was particularly good as a 15 minute addition. I think of it mostly as a bittering hop, not a flavor hop. I could be wrong though.

Your grain bill looks good. But I also agree about adding some percentage (up to 10%) non-malt sugar to help dry it out. Be sure to mash low too.

Thanks for the tips. I'll take the brown sugar into consideration and keep my mash low.

I'm really toying with the hops here. There's a sizable thread on this forum of folks who really like both Chinook and Columbus (Tomahawk) for flavor/finish. The descriptions as adding earthy/spicy flavors intrigue me and I really want to get some of that in my barley wine. I have read that Stone uses only Magnum and Tomahawk in their Old Guardian, which I really enjoy. I've got to imagine that at least some of the Tomahawk is used in flavoring there.

I'm wondering about the quantities though. Should I dial back the late additions since these are so high alpha? Does high alpha equate to strong flavor during late addition?