i started making wine kits last year and now am very excited to get into making beer. I live in a small condo so to start out i am going to try a no boil kit, like Coopers Real ALE. My question is Do I need a Fermenting Bucket and A bottling bucket or can i just ferment in the bottling bucket and move beer to carboy for secondary fermention, and back to bottling bucket to bottle. I have a fermentation bucket i use for wine but have read that i should not use for both beer and wine because of the smell. I'm just looking to try and save some money on the equipment. Any info would be great.
The Coopers kits make a decent beer if you:
1) Throw away the instructions;
2) Use 2# of x-light LME or 1.5# of x-light DME instead of the sugar they call for;
3) Discard the yeast in the kit and use a good dry yeast like US-05;
4) Primary for 10-14 days.
I presume you already have a good sanitizer to use since you have been doing wine. The &@#% kits say to use bleach. That is asking for nasty nasty beer since it is very hard to rinse all of the chlorine out. You do not want any residual chlorine or it will make for bad beer. I use Starsan.
You are correct you don't want to use the same bucket for wine and beer, or your beer will taste like wine and your wine will taste like hops.
I do not have a bottling bucket. I don't have anything with a spigot, because they are hard to sanitize and are a common source of infections. When I am ready to bottle I rack into one of my primary buckets and syphon from there into bottles with a bottle filler.
A tip for starting the syphon: fill your racking cane and tube with sanitizer by submerging them. Dip the bottle filler in the sanitizer so it is filled and attach to the racking tube. Press the bottle filler down into a large drinking glass and let the flow run until all of the sanitizer comes out and you start getting beer. Then start filling your bottles.