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.