Strong Ale/ Barley Wine for Christmas

[UpsidedownA (Andrew)]

probably a bit late, but I'm brewing a strong ale for Christmas today.

I'm just doing a small batch 10L or so so that I can use my regular mash tun without worrying about finding extra capacity.

I'm going for 1.090 starting gravity and expect a final gravity of around 1.020 (Not sure how realistic this is). Assuming a 60% extract efficiency, and 300 litre degrees per kilo for base malt and 265 litre degrees per kilo for the adjuncts, I've done

4.3kg Pale (86%)
453g amber (8%)
226g dark crystal (4%)
50g chocolate (1%)

Mash 60 min at 67C/ 1 teaspoon CaCl added to mash. My water is semi-soft (i.e. no obvious limescale, but do need to add salt to the dishwasher once or twice a year).

Hops. A mix of homegrown challenger and homegrown fuggles. Aiming for 60 IBUs (i.e a ratio of BU to GU of 2:3). Assumed an average alpha acid percentage of 6%, and a utilisation of 20% at the start of boil, so calculated I needed 50g, but added 100g because my hops were home grown and home dried and I'm not confident they were as dry as store bought hops are.

A lot of guess work anyway.

The one thing I've done that I hope will make a big difference is used a starter to make sure I have adequate yeast. I really dislike the winey taste of higher alcohols and I wanted to keep this to a minimum, which I believe elevated pitching levels will do. Aiming for 215 billion cells for 10 litres (21.5 million per ml).