Little heavy handed on the roast malt in my opinion. Maybe nix the roasted barley since you already have a good amount of patent malt. You could also increase the base malt to balance the roast, but then you’d have more alcohol.
I definitely dont want to add alcohol to the beer currently. Im not 100% sure what the cherries will do int he first place so the Estimated ABV could be off by up to 1% abv as is. Im currently looking for a good “malts and the character they impart” type sheet. Dropping the Roast Barley is definitely possible.
From my experiences with fruit in the secondary does not really affect you gravity/ABV. The amount of water content in the fruit offsets the amount of sugars present. 3.5 lbs of cherry purée isn’t a whole lot of cherries for a stout either in my opinion. I used 7.5 lbs if tart cherries in my cherry stout this year… I did cut it down from 10 lbs that I used last year. The cherry is certainly present at this level. I wouldn’t say go this high, but I might consider upping it to at least 5 lb so that you are certain that the cherry flavor will be present.
I agree that its not a lot, but ive read thats 3.5lbs of puree should be the equivilent of about 5lbs of fresh fruit. there is no pits etc. It did occur to me to put in 2 cans but id figured id start with one. my thought is if i dont like the cherryness after secondary i can put another can ina nd let it sit another week, no?
Sounds like as good a plan as any. Remember if you do that, give it a few days to ferment out. Another thing to consider is if you plan on aging this beer at all, the cherry flavor will begin to diminish. That is one reason why I chose to lesson my cherry amount this year. Last years batch was perfect after about 10 months. The problem was, it was gone by then lol. So this year I used less to try and hit that prime flavor zone earlier. It worked well. These were pitted tart cherries frozen from Michigan.
But I think it’s a good idea for you to taste at secondary and go from there. Looks good. Good job!
+1. It’s weird to get a secondary fermentation but not get much bump in abv, but the water in the fruit does kind of offset the fermentation from the fruit.