Making a hop tea with honey!!! Maybe!

[Moezart]

Hello friends, again!
So, a little background to help. I live in Tunisia and there are no home brewing supply stores anywhere in the country, so everything I do as far as home brewing is from scratch. Long story short I got my hands on a 5lbs of wheat extract (60% wheat 40% barley) so I figured I d make my first ever extract brew. In the absence of malted grains I added 4 lbs of table sugar hoping to boost the OG. Also, I did a mini mash of 1 lb of flaked oats mixed 150 grams of pale malt (all I had left). Plus 1 lb of wildflower honey.

1 Oz of cascade at 60 min, 0.5 of saaz at 20, and another 0.5 of saaz at 10.
As per this app called Wort, my estimated OG should be 1063. But my actual OG was only 1042. Now exactly a week later it is at 1008.

Two problems:
Beer is too sweet for my taste and too weak as far as alcohol.

Question can I hit two birds with one stone if I brew a hop tea mixed with honey? I d like to introduce more fermentables plus add more bitterness? Can such a hop tea achieve that? Assuming the hops are high alpha, and I will be using around 500 grams of honey?

Yeast used is S 33.

Thank you so much.

 

[Yooper]

I would think this would work- make the hop tea with the hops you wish and then add the honey to the resulting wort. You wouldn't want to boil the hops with the honey, as that will really decrease the hops utilization.

 

[Dgallo]

You wouldn't want to boil the hops with the honey, as that will really decrease the hops utilization.

Why would that decrease the utilization? Wouldn’t adding the honey mimic wort and the hops have the same utilization as they would if it were s full extract or allgrain brew? I was always under the impression that the sugar in wort was a catalyst for isomerization

 

[Yooper]

Why would that decrease the utilization? Wouldn’t adding the honey mimic wort and the hops have the same utilization as they would if it were s full extract or allgrain brew? I was always under the impression that the sugar in wort was a catalyst for isomerization

It's about amounts and the gravity of the wort. Not actually the gravity (as that's been disproven) but the amount of "stuff" in the wort negatively impacts utilization.

I'm assuming you'll be making this a small amount, and as it is you'd be hard pressed to get many IBUs in a small volume. Say you add an ounce of hops to three quarts of liquid and boil for an hour- you'd be lucky to get much in the way of IBUs. Adding that to 5 gallons of lower-IBU wort means even less IBUs total. So you want to make sure you get as much utilization out of it as you can. Then add the honey after the boil.