What’s so striking is that neither the differences in alcohol nor sugar content led to perceptible differences in the finished beers.

I think there are some some issues here with the interpretation of statistics.

The experiment did show that the panel could detect differences between the beers, just not reliably enough to reach the statistical significance you've arbitrarily assigned to signify "proof" that there was a difference (p<0.05).

I.e. with the experiment giving p=0.16 that means that if you said "there is a difference between the beers", you'd expect to be wrong 16% of the time. However, if you said "there is no difference between the beers" (as in the quote above), you'd expect to be wrong 84% of the time.

I think a better conclusion would be "there probably is a difference between the beers, but our experiment didn't have enough participants to conclusively say there is" and maybe "this indicates that the difference is probably small".