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This is the hefeweizen I've been brewing, I took a snapshot of the hydrometer sample with my cameraphone. This was taken on day 21 of primary fermentation.

It would work, but your probably better off buying a 3 pound bag of dried malt extract for $10 instead of liquid, just because you can save whatever portion you dont use for your next batch. From there just do a basic 1gal boil with .5oz of boiling hops at the start and .5oz of finishing hops...

Well if your going to rack to a secondary it might be in your interest to add extra ginger then. Otherwise leave the sediment that's a part of fermentation. There's a good recipe here in this thread that I'll be making tomorrow, it has lots of tips/tricks for ginger ale in the comments...

And this is for a 5 gallon batch I presume? What kind of sugar, table sugar or dextrose?

I don't know if it is or isn't, but your beer is in my prayers.

I"d reccomend The Complete Joy of Homebrewing by Charlie Papazian. It's pretty much the bible of American Homebrewing and clocks in at 425 pages of Beginner to advanced teachings, as well as about a hundred time proven recipes.

Try gently swirling your fermenter for 60 seconds and raising the temperature to re-activate your yeast if it still tastes sweet.

Well unless you were planning it you shouldnt have a cidery taste at all that's definatly an "off" flavor and unless the brewery filters their beer there really isnt much of a difference between what they do and what you can make at home. If I had to guess it might be because of the dextrose???

What exactly are in the kits you buy? Most of the kits I've done in the past come with a can or two of LME and/or some DME adding up to total weight of 6.6lbs/3kg and that's all I used for fermentables. What temperature are you fermenting your beers at? Sometimes if your fermenting too warm...

If your fermenter can fit in there sure. I'd slap a thermometer on the inside and adjust it to wherever I want my temp to be 24 hours before brew-day just in-case though.

Yup, might be time to pick up a new cap for your fermenter.

I usually "start" my yeast in a cup of slightly warm water and let them hydrate for 15 min before I pitch it. That's really all I do and I haven't had issue using that method.

Well part of that might be one of those Self-fufilling prophecies, or maybe even a slight placebo effect. (you expect it to taste better so you perceive it as such) As for unwanted carmalization that's more of a user error than anything as you just need to dial down the temperature a bit and...

What potentially happened is that you didn't get a good seal when you capped those two bottles and the cap gave. I think if it was too much priming sugar you'd have had more than two bottles burst.

You dont need a fancy temperature controller for your fridge, just adjust the dial until you reach your target temp, and confirm it with any old thermometer that you can tape to the inside. What you would need the digital thermometer for is when your doing a mash since you need to know and...

Honestly IMHO, unless your supremely confident in your brewing skills and have been doing it for years, a partial grain recipe is the best of both worlds, you get the added flavor profiles/originality of your choice specialty grains, while "hedging the bet" with an extract so that you don't have...

You may not want to sit there babysitting it, but agitating the ice bath does speed up the process of cooling considerably, otherwise you get a layer of warm water surrounding your pot.

If your doing a full boil you do need a wort chiller to cool it in a reasonable amount of time. But before you buy in, ask yourself what you expect to gain by doing a full boil versus a partial boil (many people dont see any real difference), and what your ultimate goals are for brewing. Are...

In most cases it's almost hard to get a bacterial infection, while it can and does happen to the sloppy folks out there, as long as you did some form of sanitation on your equipment and you pitched your yeast at the right temp it's pretty rare. Fermentation is a race between your yeast and...

A full boil also takes forever to heat up unless you have an Uber-sized burner under your pot. (it also takes forever to cool off unless you have a wort chiller)