NB extract kit question

[crud99]

I’m going to make the Irish Red extract kit by NB.
I’ve made one other kit before so I’m kinda new so I have a couple of questions about the following steps:

" Seal the fermenter. Add approximately 1 tablespoon of
water to the sanitized fermentation lock. Insert the lock
into rubber stopper or lid, and seal the fermenter.

Move the fermenter to a warm, dark, quiet spot until
fermentation begins"

1. My last kit I tried using my air lock but there was just way too much foam coming out so I had to make a makeshift blow off tube which when to an empty pot. Which is the correct way to do it? This is for the primary fermentor.

2. I have a Better Bottle primary fermentor and then a bottleing bucket with spigot. I’m not going to bottle this time, I probably just going to go straight to a keg. Can I use this bottleing bucket as the secondary fermentor? When would I do this and what would I do? Thank you very much!!!

[dobe12]

With better bottles, you should almost always use a blow off just in case. They don’t have much head space and I usually need one. If you control your ferm temps (low 60s) this should help cut down on heavy foaming, but it’s still possible. Buckets are bigger and have more head space and I’ve never needed a blow off using one.

As for the bottling bucket with spigot… There are a lot of factors here that can/will be debated time and time again. First, you don’t really need a secondary unless you are aging the beer for a while, plan on dry hopping or adding something to the beer post fermentation and plan on rinsing the yeast, or if you just want to free up the primary for another beer. If either of these are the case, I would just go buy a 5 gallon secondary (whichever you prefer, BB, Carboy, bucket). The problem with a spigot is there are little places in there for bacteria to hide. And there is always a slight chance is could leak. I don’t use my bottling bucket w/spigot for anything except bottling the occasional beer.

[crud99]

So sounds like I really don’t need to use a secondary then. I’m just going to keg it all this time.
Can I just go straight from my fermentor to the keg then? Or do I need to put it in the bottling bucket to get rid of some of the sedement? Thanks!!!

[loopie_beer]

You can go straight to kegging. No need to risk infection by transfering to a bottling bucket then to keg.