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When you baked your bread, you most likely missed some heat from above. (And it seems that the oven you use might be designed that way, meaning that preheating uses top and bottom elements [but retaining heat is only done via bottom elements](https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-the-broil-bake-options-in-the-oven).)

In order to achieve a brown crust and a nice inside taste, you want the the heat to be evenly distributed in your oven. It's important that your bread is heated from the top and the bottom. The top heating provides you with a brown crust, the bottom heating ensures that your bread base is strong enough. The best option to achieve this is to use a two-sided heating option so that your oven generates heat from the top and bottom elements and retains it with top and bottom elements.

If you can't do this, you have alternatives. One is to use a grill or broiler function the last minutes when baking. Usually, grill and broiler elements provide heat as long as they are turned on so be sure to only do this in the last minutes of baking. Turning on a grill function from the beginning will surely burn your bread.

Another option is to brush your crust when baking with various "glazes". There are a lot of options, common ones are beaten eggs, egg yolk or coffee. You can also adjust the actual ingredients to bake different breads: breads with malt are naturally browner while pumpernickel breads are as dark as it gets. (If the whole bread is darker, it's not as apparent when the crust isn't as brown as desired.)

One thing you should always do is to provide a slightly humid environment in your oven. Humidity helps the inside of baked goods to remain mainly soft even though the outsides are dry and firm (the crusts). Breads especially taste better that way[^1]: Contrary to cakes who often have fruit toppings or fillings that provide additional humidity, breads lack liquid-heavy ingredients. To solve this problem, you can coat your bread with water before or during baking or put a small bowl with water in your oven. (If you have an oven with a steam function, you can also just use this.)

To make your crust perfect, it's also a good idea to coat your bread with water as soon as you take it out. The water evaporates almost instantly and leads to a crust with a slight gloss.

[^1]: Breads also have other advantages from increased humidity. When baked in a more humid environment, a bread has increased elasticity, meaning that, for example, the probability of crusts tearing up is reduced.