Adding hop tea at bottling

I made an arrogant bastard clone about 2 weeks ago. I racked it to the secondary today and because I was only able to do a partial boil, it lacks the hop character I was hoping for. Would it be possible to boil an additional amount of hops in just water and add it to the bottling bucket in a few weeks to increase the IBU's?

You could always dry hop it in the secondary, but judging from your mention of boiling the hops, I assume you want to add more of a bittering character to your beer. I wouldn't expect your method to give you the results you want. This is because the alpha acid isomerization reactions, the ones that produce the bitter products, are both pH and temperature dependent. That is to say that boiling hops in a neutral solution, like water, will produce different products than boiling in an acidic solution, like wort. Unfortunately I can't tell you what the alternative reaction products would be or what they would taste like (somebody else help here?). The most conservative approach to get some more hop character at this stage would be to dry hop, but I would be interested to find out how it turns out if you try the tea method.

Increasing bittering is possible, but very limited. Pure water won't take more than about 90 IBU, so two quarts of hop tea would add 8-9 IBU and dilute your batch 10%.

As david noted, the amount of bittering you can add at bottling time will be limited as you can only dilute the beer so much... 8-9 IBU might be worth it if it is a 6% ABV beer that can use a little diluting, however it might not be worth it in some cases.

If you know ahead of time that a partial boil is going to limit your bittering, then you could have boiled 1.5g or so of water and bittering hops (maxed out at 90IBU as david discussed) and use it as cooling water. 1.5g (when diluted to 5g) would get you about 27IBU and if you plan ahead you would not be diluting the beer at all; you'd use the 1.5g bitter water as cooloff water... 27 IBU + the IBU of the wort can make a pretty effective way to boost IBU in a limited boil. I plan on trying this tomorrow as I just discovered it myself. I will boil 1.5g ahead of time with 12%AA hops to max it out at 90IBU in solution (of plain water to be used as topoff water). Then I will brew the beer (wort) to about its 90IBU max. When these are both diluted to 5 g I should be around 54IBU...

Let us know what you decide and how it works.

Thanks for all of the info guys. The SG was 1.086 and the FG is about 1.016 so I think I might make an attempt to try the tea, diluting this bad boy probably won't be that big a deal with that high of a SG. Perhaps, as far as acidity is concerned, I can add some gypsum to the water to increase it's acidity, possibly also include the priming sugar as well. Thoughts?
Any recommendations on the amount of water and hops to try with regards to the tea?

Carpe3dm, I'm also going to take your suggestion and throw some columbus into the secondary with it for about a week.

Rest assured I will post the results of this endeavor after I finish.

Well the good news is that your SG was 1.086 and it can use being diluted a bit. As david noted, you can get an additional 8IBU out of 2 quarts at the risk of diluting the beer 10%. So, make your call based on that.

So, you can add 8IBU or so and still have a 1.077 SGish gravity beer (at this point I would not add anymore malt or priming sugar except to bottle; if you want more bitterness, the last thing you want is more sugars). Seems like that would be fine to me. Depending how much IBU you want and how much you don't care about dilution, you may want to go for an entire gallon?! This would provide 15IBU (solution max at 90IBU/6g total in the end) and dilute your beer to around a 1.069 (.086 less 20%) less SGish beer. And you'd get an extra gallon of it at that!

Let us know what you decide...

Thanks for your input silkky. I think I am going to go with the half gallon addition, hopped with chinook (the only hop I used in the wort). Would it be best to re-rack to another carboy with the cooled tea now and let it sit another week or two, or should I wait until bottling time and add the tea then? I'm thinking letting it sit for a week or two in the carboy might not be a bad idea at this point.

I don't think it really matters when you do it. You are upping the IBU and diluting the beer at either point... Myswell do it now if you plan to dryhop on top of that too. That will give it plenty of time to get fully and evenly distributed into the batch.

Why not add some Dry Extract to the water and make around a 1.050 solution and then boil the hops in it? Granted, it is in 2ndary but this seems better than "tea" (but what do I know...)