Keegan Ale's Hurricane Kitty clone

I've been doing Mini-mash brewing for about a year now, and have been trolling the forums for inspiration (I think I'll wait until I get my all-grain setup running this summer before trying the DFH 120s!). I've gotten far enough along to start being adventurous, and I'm thinking about putting together a Hurricane Kitty clone.

I seem to remember this beer as being a more hoppy copper ale. After cutting my teeth on New England beers like Otter Creek Copper & Long Trail IPA, now I'm on the west coast and trying to build some of the flavors of home.

I contacted Tommy Keegan, and he was able to give me some guidelines:
90% 2 row pale malts
5% crystal
5% caramalt
Columbus hops for bittering, Cascade for everything else, including dry hop
OG = 17.5P (1.072)
FG = 3P (1.012)

On the internet, I found:
SRM 8
IBU 63

With those in mind, I put this together in Beersmith:
8lbs 2-row US Pale
6.4oz Crystal 60L
6.4oz Crystal 10L (replaces the caramalt)

Mash @ 150F for 75min, Sparge w/ 2.6gal @ 168F (Beersmith single infusion, no mash out profile)

.65oz Columbus (14% aa) @ start of boil
.75oz Cascade (5.5% aa) w/ 15m to go
1oz Cascade (5.5% aa) w/ 5m to go

California Ale (WLP001) yeast

1oz Cascade dry hop for 7 days

Mini-Mash:
3lbs 7.4oz Light DME
2lbs 0.4oz 2-row US Pale
2.8oz Crystal 60L
2.8oz Crystal 10L
Same mash profile as above

Now it's been a good 5 years since I've had this beer, and I don't have a good base of copper ales to compare this recipe against, so I'm turning to the community for help in tuning this. I may have some time to try this out (in a mini-mash) in about 2 weeks, otherwise it will have to wait until July.

Thank you for your help!

sorry don't have any real input, but I'm interested how it turns out

I would bet that it's mashed higher (155 F) and uses a very different British yeast strain like Ringwood Ale Yeast - Wyeast 1187 or perhaps something like White Labs WLP002. The clarity of this copper beer was amazing as well as the head. But one thing I really disliked about this beer was the sweetness and extreme maltyness of it. If the IBUs were projected to be around 63, it sure tasted more like 45. I attribute this to a combo of high crystal malts, low attenuating yeast, and high mash temps.

Light DME may contain approx. 3-8% crystal already. So choose Extra Light DME or reduce the crystal in the PM version. Muntons makes a good 10-12 L caramalt. I would stick with Muntons products for this beer, including caramalt and XL DME, plus use English Crystal 60. I definitely got more of a British malt feel to this beer with some American hop accentuation.

Thanks - I'll shuffle the recipe around a bit with these recommendations - definitely looking for a drier style. Now I just need more time...

After taking the comments here into consideration, here's what I ended up with for attempt 1:
(5gal finished volume, mini-mash)
3lbs8oz US 2-row Pale
8oz US Crystal 10L
8oz US Crystal 60L
5lbs10oz Extra Light DME
1.1oz Columbus 13.9%aa for 60m
1.25oz Cascade 6.2%aa for 15m (+ whirlfloc)
1.67oz Cascade 6.2%aa for 5min
White Labs WLP007 (Dry English Ale)
Dry Hop: 1.75oz Cascade 6.2%aa for 7 days

Prime with 3.75oz Corn Sugar

Mash grains in 2.5gal water for 60min @ 155F, sparge w/ 1gal water @168F
After cooling down from the boil, add water to bring to 5gal volume
Target OG: 1.070, my OG: 1.068 @ 65F
Target FG: 1.016, my FG: 1.017 @ 69F

As beersmith predicted, my SRM ended up somewhere around 8, so this is a pretty light-colored beer. Tasting the unfermented wort demonstrated a fairly good balance between hops and malt, my notes commented on a caramel flavor.
This was the first bottle-conditioned beer I've done in about 4 months, since all my kegs were used up, so I didn't get to taste it until 6/24. The bottles are bit overcarbed, so the beer is a bit fizzier than I want, probably dial back to 3.5 or 3.25oz next time. And there will be a next time, because this ended up being a very drinkable pale ale. It doesn't carry quite so much bitterness as my last pale ale, which was made with Magnum / Galaxy. The beer also has less of a grassy flavor than the Galaxy hops did, so more malt comes through.

I've moved the needle on the malt bill a little bit for the next attempt to try and get the SRM up a bit. While the original recipe called for an SRM of 7 or 8, I seem to remember the original being darker. I'm not changing the hops bill at all, and will keg this one so I can easily compare the two. But that's not the fun part. Just after discussing this brew with a co-worker on the east coast, it showed up at his favorite bottle house. I've been told to expect a fedex package in the next few days...

To set the stage, flying blind we created two attempts at Hurricane Kitty. The first recipe is above, and the second attempt was made by reducing the amount of 2-row by 4oz and increasing the Crystal 60 by 4oz. The hop bill & mash profile stayed the same.

Finally got a chance to compare my beers against the original. The first thing we noticed about Keegan Ale's beer was the sweetness. The beer carried a stronger sugar / molasses taste than any of the homebrews. The flavor and aroma hops were also less prevalent in the original than in either of the clone attempts.

The color of recipe 1 (8oz of Crystal 60) was spot-on to the target beer. The bitterness seemed about correct, but did carry more hop taste and smell - not abnormal for the west-coast styles we typically drink. The general consensus around the hop-heads at the table was that recipe 1 was better than the original.

Recipe 2 was much darker than the target beer (12oz of Crystal 60). Depending on who we asked, this beer seemed to accentuate the hops a little bit more, but that could also be because it was 6 weeks fresher.

At the end, we decided that the best beer was made by blending Recipe 1 and 2 50/50. Eventually we will try again by modifying the malt bill appropriately. If you want to mirror Hurricane Kitty exactly, dial back the aroma & flavor hops a little bit (maybe be less aggressive in the dry hop?), and try to find the caramalt the brewer calls for, maybe that will bring back the sweetness we are missing.

Maybe they were out at the brewery and used Columbus, but when I was there last year I saw them using Chinook for bittering. Not Columbus.