Questions from a new homebrewer

Temperature is way too high. You need to find a way to get that down. Get a decent starter kit, keep your fermentation temp low, and watch your sanitation and you'll be fine

 

Welcome to the BA site, Jos3h2r. It seems like you're already learning your way around the site if you've managed to find yourself in this forum. Glad to have you here.

To try to have the right conditions for fermenting in a hot climate is a challenge, but it can be done. Using an old refrigerator with an external temp controller is one way, and using a swamp cooler is another. I did a search on 'swamp cooler' and came up with this list of threads. Browse in the threads that describe ways to make one, or just google it.
http://www.beeradvocate.com/community/search/30949746/?q=swamp&o=date&c[node]=8

As for the plastic buckets, you'll probably want to have at least one, preferably with a spigot, that can be used for a bottling bucket. To try to bottle your beer directly from your fermentor can be tricky because you'll have to deal with the trub in there to keep it from going into the bottles.

 

Have you thought about what beer you would like to emulate to justify wanting 5gal worth? Or at least what style? Recipes can be dead simple. Procedures are what makes it FANTASTIC.

 

I think your bottles were contaminated, since you tried the beer after fermentation and it was ok (funky flavor may be from young or green beer). How did you sanitize your bottles?

 

A fermentor with a high aspect ratio fits nicely into a relatively small ice chest where the fermentation temperature can be maintained easily with a 22-oz bottle of frozen water or two swapped out once or twice a day.

http://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/homebrew-in-a-hot-apartment.260804/#post-3327584

 

If temperature control is out of your reach right now, do as you suggested and develop a taste for saison ... I routinely brew them in the summer here because they can easily take a 90° fermentation temperature. I happen to love the style, so that works for me. If you love the style, it can work for you too

 

For what it's worth, I have brewed using the BrewDemon conical fermenter, and I had really good results with the fermenter itself. I did not by the starter kit, I just brewed using a combination of LME and DME that I bought at my local homebrew shop ("LHBS"). The fermenter is definitely not the problem.

1) As many people have said, the temperature you brewed at is much too high. Do you have a room you keep regularly air conditioned, or do you have a basement you can use that is much cooler. Swamp cooler sounds like a good idea.

2) You really should probably get a better kit. I can't speak specifically to the kit you used, but many starter kits included with fermenters aren't the best. What kind of beers do you like? Try and find a kit in that style that was not sitting around on the shelves forever.

 

The Brewdemon reminds me of Mr. Beer.

Below is a video on how you can make ‘better’ beer using a Mr. Beer kit:

 

By siphoning your beer off of the trub in the fermentor and into a bottling bucket, you'll leave most of the trub behind, although a tiny amount always gets sucked up in the siphon depending on how far above your trub that you place the intake end of the tube. There is no reason to keep the beer in the bottling bucket any longer like using a secondary. (Regardless of what many recipes say, using a secondary is not really necessary unless you are going to age your beer on oak, fruit, etc.)

Be sure that your beer is ready to be bottled by taking two gravity readings a few days apart when you think fermentation is complete. The gravity readings will confirm that fermentation is done if these two readings are very close to each other, AND your readings are fairly close to the expected reading from the recipe.

The bottling process has to be done with some priming sugar added to your beer, and the best way to do that is to calculate how much sugar that you need for your liquid volume (even though you may be doing a 5-gallon recipe, you may only have closer to 4 gallons due to water boil off, so be careful because you could be adding too much priming sugar), then boil that sugar with a small amount of water. Add that syrup into the bottom of your bucket and gently siphon your beer into the bucket on top of the sugar. After the beer is in the bucket, gently stir the beer without creating any bubbling or agitation so that the sugar is well mixed into the liquid. You should also stir a few times during the bottling process because that heavy sugar will be trying to settle out of the beer. Then, just follow your bottling and capping procedures to finish your beer, store the bottles at the same temp at which they fermented, and wait a couple of weeks for carbonation to occur in the bottle.

 

I think there's a couple things going on here.
First is of course your fermentation temps - and with the advice given so far, sounds like you have a handle on that. Another option is to brew styles using yeast that can handle higher temps, like saisons.
Another thing is just length of fermentation. You didn't mention if you tested the gravity before bottling, but a week doesn't really seem like enough time for things to happen in there. Besides the actual fermentation, the yeast will actually work to clean up byproducts, things that will cause off-flavors in the finished beer. Generally you want to give at least several days or a week for the yeast to "clean up after themselves" - personally I leave my beer in primary fermentation for 3 weeks before bottling.
The last thing I will mention is the age of the extract used. Older extract can become stale, giving more off flavors that no yeast can clean up - it's the dreaded "homebrew twang" referred to often. Your being in Panama, I don't know what the homebrew supply situation is there, but I have read often about homebrewers in Central and South America (heck, plenty here in the States as well) for whom getting fresh ingredients is very difficult.
If you haven't already, look into a couple books on brewing, the two most recommended is John Palmer's How to Brew (there is an early edition available online for free, http://www.howtobrew.com/ ) and Charlie Papazian's Complete Joy of Homebrewing.

 

The only thing inherently '5 gallons' about that is the fermenting bucket, everything else will work fine for smaller batches(including bottling bucket). Even the fermenting bucket would be fine for 2 or 3 gallon batches(but your brew demon would be better).

 

Why did you think they were about to explode? If it's because the plastic bottles became very rigid, that would be normal. But if you opened the bottles and got strong geysers, that could indicate a problem.