My first recipe: A Winter Warmer

This will only be sy fourth beer so I don't think I'm quite ready to develop recipes. I thought I'd be adventurous and give it a try anyway. I was wondering if I'm creating a disaster. Any suggestions?

Here's my recipe for 5 gallons:

Malt
11 lbs American 2-row
1 lb Crystal malt 90L
1 lb Crystal malt 60L
.50 lb Chocolate Malt

Added at start of boil
1 lb. honey
peel from several oranges

Hops
1 oz Galena (90 min)
1 oz Galena (60 min)
1 oz Glacier (40 min)
1 oz Glacier (30 min)

Yeast
Belgian (not sure which one yet)

Added in secondary
2 tsp. of a blend of spices which includes cadamom, cinnamon, cloves, ginger

Mash temp: 158ish
IBUs: 28
Hoping for an OG of 1.070

 

I would add the honey and orange peel to the end of the boil at 0 minutes, so that they will retain their flavors otherwise the will just be boiled off.

 

And watch out for the cloves. They are pungient and will easily take over.

 

I'll definitely watch out for the cloves! I'll probably pick most of them out of the mix of spices.

Would adding the orange peels at the end of the boil give it much of an orange flavor? I was thinking maybe the last 10 minutes or so.

 

You probably only want to add the zest of the oranges and carefully avoid the white pith. I've also had really good results with adding a little bit of orange extract that I got at the grocery store.

Also, the 40 and 30 min hop addition won't do much - maybe move 'em to 10 or flameout?

(And this recipe might turn out to be awesome but, FWIW, when I experiment with new things, I like to do a 2.5 gal batch - I've had 5 gallons of bad experiments before and it sucks.)

 

If I were you don't put equal amounts of cloves as the rest of the spices, put less. I did equal of spices for a pumpkin ale and it's very cloves forward.

 

Would soaking the spices in bourbon rather than vodka give the beer any added flavor? I thought a bit of a bourbon flavor might be nice in a winter beer.