I just had another cerveza. The carbonation is great. I love the bite. This was using straight table sugar into the bottle method (per mr beer). Had a slight apple ciderish flavor. I guess it's not bad if you trick your to thinking its not supposed to be a corona type beer. The fizz gets lost rather quickly though.
Ps I received my free thermometer/priming sugar magnet. Thanks mr beer. Better late than never.
Cool. Everything is fixable.
Read on, Macduff.
Since you got good carbonation on this one, I suspect your batch priming process needs to be tweaked a bit. I think you probably weren't getting it mixed evenly, so some beers were overcarbed and others flat. If you try it again, I'd recommend using 8-12 fl oz of water with the sugar. Stir it to dissolve the sugar and bring it to a boil. If the sugar doesn't dissolve, stir it again after it heats a while (I used to do this in the microwave and if the sugar didn't dissolve at first, I'd heat it for a minute, stir, then continue). I had good luck adding the sugar water solution first and swirling with the tubing coiled on the bottom as you described, but another approach is to fill the priming container halfway before adding the sugar water.
I'd also skip trying to make invert sugar. The approach you took probably didn't do that anyway. In my opinion, there's no need to get fancy with the priming sugar. I've always used plain old table sugar except for on time when I bought a kit that had "priming sugar" (probably corn sugar) included. The way I look at it is that the purpose of the priming sugar is to give the yeast something to eat and convert to CO2 (and a little alcohol). The amounts used are so small that it's insignificant compared with the total malt bill.
The apple cider flavor is from acetaldehyde. It's a sign of "green" beer, or beer that needs to be aged a little longer.
Extract beers tend not to produce much of a head and what head they produce will generally fade quickly. You can increase the head (as well as body and mouthfeel) of your beer by using some steeping grains. Many people say that adding steeping grains gives a fresher taste to the final product.
Something like carapils (or carafoam) will increase the head retention, body and mouthfeel with little or no change to the color or flavor. If you want to add a little color and flavor, using something like C-60 will work. There are other steeping grains, like c-20, c-80, etc; the bigger the number, the darker the grain. I mentioned C60 because I use that in a lot of APAs.
For a Mr Beer batch, I'd use about 4 oz of grain. It should be crushed, whether at the LHBS or at home (I have a mill, so I crush my own). Don't buy several pounds crushed; you don't want them sitting around crushed. You can put it in a muslin bag (or a paint strainer or jelly strainer) and soak it in about a quart of water. It's not technically required to put it in a bag, but you need to do something to make sure you leave the grain behind and some sort of permeable bag works best (you could pour through a stainer, I suppose).
Soak it in a quart of hot (150-170, but not over 170) water for 30 minutes, remove the grains, and bring the steeping water to a boil, then follow the normal instructions from that point on.
Another thing you can do is a partial mash, but that requires (at a minimum) more time for the mash vs steep and a full 60 minute boil.
You can get a great beer using extracts, as long as you use fresh extracts. You'll probably also want to use steeping grains and/or a partial mash to get a great beer, but you can get a decent beer just using extracts (like a Mr Beer kit).
I've been brewing almost 5 years and I generally do partial mash batches (extract + mash with specialty grains). Part of the reason for that is that my LHBS sells LME for a really low price if I buy in bulk. I rarely buy kits now and usually design my own, but sometimes I'll pick up Mr Beer refills on clearance after Christmas. I've made some really good batches (even 5 gallon batches) using Mr Beer refills.
