Homebrewing this weekend (first go at it)--need some help

So my first recommendation is to check out www.howtobrew.com and familiarize yourself with the basics.
but to answer your questions...
1. While you have a five gallon pot, you can not boil five gallons of product. Liquids expand when heated, and you will have boils overs. If you are steadfast you could start with four gallons of water. A trick that I used while doing extract was to add half the lme or dme at the beginning of the boil and half at the last five minutes. This helps utilize the hops better as your gravity will be high untill you top up with water to reach your 5 gallons.
2. Hops won't add abv. Only fermentable sugars provided by malt or sugar additions can add abv. The citra hops will add flavor, and I would put them in as a dryhop addition, or right at the end of your boil when you turn off your heat and let them steep half an hour before chilling. If you were to provide the recipe it would be easier to help you with modifications of the recipe.
3. I use star san to sanitize my gear. I keep a five gallon bucket of it on hand to sanitize with and I don't rinse it either. I simply pour some in my fermenter, throw the lid on, and shake.

 

The most important piece of advice @SFACRKnight gave you is read "How to Brew." In fact, if you had already, you wouldn't even have needed to ask these questions (or the other ones you should be asking, but don't realize yet). Not that we mind answering questions, but everyone should read "How to Brew" or even "Joy of Home Brewing" before brewing their first batch. The former has a free version online, which is convenient. So you can read it before Saturday. The brewing with extract chapter is an easy read.

To what @SFACRKnight said, I'll add: Don't listen to anything the guy at the local homebrew store tells you unless you are absolutely sure he knows what he's talking about. The fact that he works there ain't enough. If he sold you an extra ounce of Citra and recommended adding it without telling you when, he's either lazy or incompetent.

As already said, post the full recipe, and you'll get plenty of advice about how to incorporate the extra hops. I never recommend tinkering with changes to kits for a first brew, but you already bought the hops, so you might as well use them wisely.

 

Adding hops to up ABV?????? Most like IBU.
What VikeMan said, especially about reading.
I would say that with a 5 gallon put (20QT?) you should be able to safely boil 3.5 gallons, maybe close to 4.
I have a 33 qt Graniteware pot, (8.25gal) and it barely fits the 6.5 - 7 gallons I target for full boil.
I'm planning on getting a 40-qt (10gallon) one soon to have the extra headroom.
Without seeing the recipe up close, I would probably say that a good use of the extra hops would be at flameout. Let them sit for 10 or 15 minutes before starting to chill.

 

Welcome to the BA site, niko, and to the Homebrewing forum. Everyone above recommended reading How to Brew because it is a VERY good source for complete information for you to have an understanding of the beer-making process before you brew your first beer. It's obvious from your questions that you are not ready to start yet, but if you want to give it a go this weekend, you still have time to get it done. And if you want to try to get it done by asking questions here, we're all ready to help you get it done, but it is important that you give us some help first by providing a link to the kit that you are going to brew, and especially the instructions. Right now we don't know whether your kit is for malt extract or all-grain brewing, and different answers to questions will depend on which method.

The type of questions that you asked are seen frequently in this forum, so here's a link to the results of a search that I did of this forum using the search word 'newbie'. http://www.beeradvocate.com/community/search/32565176/?q=newbie&o=date&c[title_only]=1&c[node]=8

The questions that you asked above have been adequately answered in the posts above, although I'll clarify one point on the size of your boil kettle. If you are brewing a 5-gallon recipe, ideally you'd want to start with 6-6.5 gallons for a 'full boil' so that you'd need a 7-7.5 gallon kettle. Extra head space is needed to allow room for a rolling boil, plus there is a high risk of having a boil-over (everyone has on one their first brewing session) and the extra head space gives you extra time to stop it if you see it coming (and it does happen fast). So with your 5-gallon pot, you will have to boil around 4 gallons and then add water to attain the 5 gallons of wort after the boil is complete. That's a completely normal way to brew, so don't feel that you've started wrong already.

Another point, instructions that come with beer kits are notorious for being very general to produce an okay beer, so if we see the instructions we can steer you the fine-tuned way to a better beer.

So many new brewers find out too late that they are not quite able to properly brew beer because of their environment. Two things that pop up as roadblocks are (1.) whether you are able to boil 4 gallons (it's tough to do on an electric stove), and (2.) whether you have a place to put your fermentor bucket/carboy that will maintain an ambient temp around 65 degrees. There are work-around things that you can do to still brew beer, so if either of those two points that I mention are roadblocks for you, tell us so that we can give you help in those areas.

It sounds from the title of your post that you may be anxious to get that first brew done, but you'll find that patience is very important in this hobby. Impatience can, and does, lead to bad beer, so pull back from your weekend schedule if you decide that you are not ready. It will save you from losing the money that you paid for that beer kit because you are unhappy with the beer's outcome.

Tell us as much as you can and we'll help you get through this first batch. It's a great hobby that you're joining into, but it won't seem that way if you aren't happy with the results.

 

Adding the priming sugar will not ruin your beer. It will ferment completely and add a little more alcohol, so you might be able to taste that. The beer could also have a bit more dry finish, but that's no big thing. You don't even need to get more of it for when you bottle. Using table sugar is completely okay. You'll need to know exactly how much beer that you have and then use a priming sugar calculator to determine how much table sugar to use for your amount of liquid.

The wort is a sterile liquid so that the longer that it is kept in an unsealed environment, the risk becomes greater that something floating in the air like wild yeast could get into the beer and 'infect' it. If you kept your brew kettle closed during the period that the wort was cooling, you'll be okay. But don't sweat this situation now that the wort is in the fermentor.

You won't need to transfer this beer to a secondary fermentor. Recent brewing protocol now says that a secondary fermentor is only needed if you are aging your beer on fruit, oak chips, etc. or aging/lagering your beer in bulk. Transferring to a secondary opens you up to having an accident during the transfer and exposing your beer to the air and allowing oxidation a chance to take hold. Brew kit instructions have yet to catch up with this newer thinking, so this is one reason we all wanted to see your kit's instructions. You'll just want to leave it in your primary fermentor until you see signs that fermentation is complete. Signs can include stoppage of bubbling in the air lock, or if your primary fermentor is a carboy, you'll notice a dropping of the krausen bubbles on the top of the beer and you'll also notice that the churning of the trub inside your beer has stopped. This is your signal to take a sample of the beer and a hydrometer reading. If your hydrometer reading is 1.104-1.017 per your kit's instruction sheet, your beer is done. Wait 2-3 days and take another reading just to confirm your first reading. If the second reading has dropped much lower, this is a sign that the beer is still fermenting and you'll have to wait longer before bottling. Keep taking hydrometer readings every 2-3 days until you get a reading that matches the previous one (+/- a point or two). You should leave the fermentor alone for at least 10 days before you try to determine if fermentation is complete. Two weeks is even better.

If you have any number of friends, and if your beer is pretty good, it will get consumed once you let the word out. However, smaller batches are commonly brewed, and smaller batches allow you to consume your beer and start another brew session again. That allows you to try different beers and to polish your brewing technique. There is a thread that was recently started about this http://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/converting-10gal-to-5gal.420621/ (and it's a regular topic so there are other threads too) so you can read it for more info. Kits are a good way to get started, but you don't know what kind of stock turnover your homebrew store has so that the ingredients could be old. I prefer to find recipes that I want to brew and then purchase the ingredients that are specific to that recipe. Your equipment can be used to make smaller batches, but I'd recommend that you at least brew 2 gallons just to help make the brewing work worth the effort. (It's the same amount of work and time regardless of batch size.)

I hope these answers are enough to the point for you. Don't hesitate to ask questions, but if you take the time to read How to Brew and the other threads that I linked for you in my last post, you'll learn a lot of the answers there.

 

If your hydrometer reading is 1.014-1.017
FTFY

 

As MotherGoose said, don't bother with a secondary - it's more work than benefit at this stage. Later on, when you're more comfortable with the process and proceedures, you can experiment with it and see it it works for you. Most of us on BA forums don't use secondary except, as he said, aging on fruit or wood, or bulk aging for some reason.
I wouldn't worry too much about taking that long to chill, as long as the cover was on the pot. If you don't have a cover or left it off, there are chances nasties will get in there and start munching along with your yeast. This is one good thing about partial boil - you can bring it down how you can,. then top off with cold water to bring the temps down even further. When I was doing partials, I was keeping a couple gallons in the freezer to get down as far as I could without turning to ice - this would bring the temp of the wort down a good 10+ degrees as fast as I could pour it in.
WHat's done is done for this brew, so don't worry too much about it.
At this point, you seem to have a handle on the conditions, 65 is right in the sweet spot for where you want it.
I would leave the beer be for at least 2 weeks. Double check a few times early on to make sure the airlock is bubbling and there appears to be some activity in there, and that things aren't overflowing. Then leave it be. I personal plan for about 3 weeks for most of my beers before pacjkaging - I check gravity about 3 days before target, and again before I start the process. Presuming the 2 gravity checks are the same, I go ahead. If it changes, I have no problem leaving things for another week. This is where a brew journal is great - or even noting on the instructions that came with - so you don't have to remember what your measurements are.
Resist the urge to constantly check the gravity, and so forth - I remember one thread, I don't remember if it was here or another one, that a guy was checking his gravity every day, and opening his bucket to see how things are going, and was wondering why he ended up bottling something like 3.5 gallons of a 5 gallon batch (he asked if there was that much trub [stuff left at the bottom]) and why he ended up with an infected - sour - beer a few weeks later.
Oh, yeah, and don't get too angry if you don't have a commercial quality beer first time out of the gate. If you have something drinkable, you're ahead of most of the first-timers.
It takes some practice and experience to get good at this - look around, there are people who brew every week, and they're still trying to improve things.

 

Damn, I thought SpellChecker could read my mind!