Big beer and happy yeast

I tend to surf the forums at Northern Brewer frequently. There is a guy over there named Denny Conn who is kind of the godfather of the forums. Anyway, he posts quite a few interesting/tasty looking recipes. One of them that sounded good was a Bourbon Vanilla Imperial Porter. I like bourbon and porter, and vanilla is good as well. So I decided to give it a shot. After several natural disasters delaying the brew day, I finally got around to brewing this past saturday. The recipe:
5.5 Gallons, 80% efficiency, target og 1.086
11 lbs pale 2-row
2.5 lbs Munich
1.5 lbs brown malt
1 lb Crystal 135
1.25 lb Chocolate malt
1.2 oz Challenger (7.5%AA) @ 60 min
1 oz East Kent Goldings (4.5%AA) @ 10 min
Mash at 153 for an hour. Run off 6.5 gallons, boil for an hour down to 5.5 gallons.
Cool to 60 deg, pitch 2 packs US-05
Everything went pretty smoothly, although I did have an issue with the manifold coming apart again. Fortunately, it filtered itself, and I ended up with about 6 gallons of 1.088 wort. Chilled down to 60, aerated and pitched yeast. Pretty short lag, this is what it looked like on sunday afternoon:

Notice the nice krausen already. Well, this thing is going crazy right now, I had to attach a blowoff hose because the airlock was clogged. Wow. I did overpitch a little, but there is a ton of sugar in there to consume. Looking forward to trying this monster, should come in around 8.5 - 9% ABV. Cheers!