Muted and bitter are going to be fairly consistent for a first run kit. If its not to your taste don’t be dismayed. If you try some more recipes’ you will improve.

For about the first 10 years I was brewing I bottled with either caps (like you have here) or grolsch bottles. If you do stick with this hobby, like I recommended with the crab boiler, I strongly recommend getting into kegging ASAP. I drank soooooo much grolsch to get the bottles I needed, I easily could have supported a small kegerator setup.

Heres the thing. Its really fucking tough to make sure you’ve got 50 bottles perfectly clean. You have to make a ton of physical movements, precisely, to keep them sanitary as you are bottling. Its super common to get some off flavors or contamination from bottling. It also is a PITA to clean, store, manage, and then fill all those fucking bottles.

Kegging? It takes like, 1/100th the time. And you can store your kegs sterile and they stay sterile (with starsan). Is literally as simple as pulling a siphon, filling the keg, closing the keg, and putting it in the fridge. And a used fridge or laydown freezer with a temperature regulator.

Its easier, cleaner, -> 0 <- spillage, it makes better beer (less contamination, better conditioning), it tastes better when you pour it. When the keg is tapped, you have 1 thing to clean, and its easier to clean (you can actually get your arm down in there; no fcking goofy bottle brushes).

Edit: Oh, and did I mention how much easier it is to get carbonation levels right in kegerators?

Good luck! Great pics. I love a good brown.

Beer tastes pretty strange when flat, and even weirder if you’re like me and forget to taste before you add the bottling sugar. Some beers do well in bottles and some don’t, and sometimes it’s the inverse depending on how you bottled and if the dog helps. But it’s always beer at the end of the day.

Your water has a tremendous impact on the beer quality and as much as people write about it there’s no quick answer to the problem. Fastest I’ve found (but haven’t tried yet) is using all RO water and adding the salts to balance it. A local brewer tipped me off that my water chemistry tends towards extremely high hop utilization which explains why a 5 min boil still made beer that tasted like IBU 90. That, and my hamfisted brewing.

The bottling gets smoother with experience.