Took a few hours and a lot of spillage, but I got 41 12oz bottles out of it. Probably could’ve gotten more. Tried a bit, and the flavor was pretty muted and bitter, but I think it just needs to age a bit in the bottles. I’ll post back in 2 weeks with the final results.
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.
The carbonation bit is the carbonic acid building up in solution. It litterally is the flavor of carbonation and dramatically alters the flavor of beer.
that makes sense