Dry hopping question and general brew-haha (relocated)

It's generally-accepted practice to dry hop in the primary nowadays, so forget about your secondary for now.

 

Do you mean bottle with hops? Not a good idea, in part because the hops' nucleation points could cause gushers.

Do you mean dry hop just for the short amount of time the beer is in the bottling bucket? That won't do much.

But you can dry hop in your primary. Just add the hops when fermentation is finished, or almost finished, then bottle about 5 days later.

 

I would just leave the beer in the primary for about 2 weeks. 3-5 days before bottling, add the dry hops. Then siphon the beer to the bottling bucket and bottle it. 4-5 days is not long enough for primary fermentation. The yeast may eat up most of the sugar, but letting it sit longer will allow the yeast to clean up off flavors. Opinions on secondary fermentation vary, but the growing consensus is that for your average ale it is unnecessary.

As far as brewing with kits go, I would toss out the kit's instructions and follow a guide such as John Palmer's How to Brew (http://www.howtobrew.com/) or Charlie Papazian's book "The Complete Joy of Homebrewing." After a few kit brews you should be ready to just start buying raw ingredients and making your own recipes, which is the real fun part of homebrewing.

Cheers and good luck!

 

It's certainly possible to create world-class brews from extract, especially with hoppy or dark styles. There are trade offs between extract and all-grain brewing. All-grain has cheaper ingredients, allows the brewer more control over the body and malt profile, and allows for brewing styles that depend on unique base malts such as Pilsners and Oktoberfests. But all-grain is more time and space consuming, requires much more knowledge and expertise, and requires more costly equipment.

Most brewers follow the trajectory of starting with extract, and only having mastered that considering moving into all-grain. Partial-mash brewing is a good steppingstone between the two. But if somebody doesn't quite have their extract brewing process down, jumping into all-grain probably would not go well.

 

Using a lid is not recommended because unwanted stuff will volatilize and leave during boiling. It probably doesn't make a huge difference to the finished beer, though.