First brew a disspointment

The fallacy on display here is a "real brew kit for 5G" will make a better beer than a smaller gallon kit.
If you did everything right with the MrB kit ... it would not have turned out nasty and a drain pour.

Making good beer doesn't just happen.
The more you do it ... and the more you pay attention to what you're doing ... the better the results.

 

Hydrometers are great if you have enough beer to spare. A 1G kit gets you seven 12-oz bottles ... if you're lucky.

Drawing a hydro-sample seems like a waste even with a 100 ml cylinder.
More better: let the fermentation ride three full weeks ... then bottle.

 

Could be trouble if the OP is brewing in Flint.

 

dude whatever. There was no need for you to respond to my post.

 

Brew on.

 

This is the kit that I started on and still use. Just brewed my 5th batch overall, my first writing my own recipe.

I find the Brooklyn Brewing kit very easy to use and fairly informative as far as starting all grain goes. Just like OP, I found the carbonation to be a little high in the first beer, so I scaled back the priming sugar to about 2/3 and got an acceptable level of carb.

My biggest suggestion with this kit is to really follow the temperature guides and lengthen the timelines they outline. My first batch turned out well, but it definitely got better after a few extra weeks in the bottle. The mouthfeel really improved and went from highly carbonated and soda-like to thicker, still highly carbonated, and very beer-like. Fermenting at too high of a temp is what really gets me, as my second batch was awful, and my 3rd batch had a hint of chemical smell from letting fermentation get up to ~78 (it was summer and hot outside and inside my house).

Stick with it! Batch 4 just got taste tested last weekend and was very good, just needed more time to thicken up a bit. Batch 5 smells delicious and has been happily fermenting for ~48 hours so far.