Don't judge it right away, big stouts improve with age- especially if you expose them to wood . Either way though it's going to change probably for the better.
Water volume change by temperature is pretty negligible, the bigger change is the volume of gas overhead shrinking (decreasing pressure). You can use the ideal gas law PV=nRT as an approximation - pressure in the headspace is approximately proportional to temp (in degrees Kelvin)- dissolving...
what is the hopping & dry-hopping schedule of this kit?
There is a bittering hops step, two sets of Whirlpool hops 8 minutes apart and two stages of dry hopping at 7 and 14 days.
Since there is no malting step involved in making rice or corn for brewing, I don't see any reason to not use the canned or raw product although I've never tried to use either. I do not aspire to clone Budweiser at home :) Pilsner malt forever!
The best way I've found to carbonate a 2 l PET bottle is a ball lock screw top plastic cap. I chill the bottle and pressurize it to 20 psi. Of course the pressure drops as the CO2 dissolves, but you can hit it with more pressure at any time. They cost about $3 each on Amazon.
The only problem I have with PET water bottles is that they're clear. I wrapped the one clear bottle I use with duct tape to keep light away from the beer.
You need to connect "gas" to "gas" first to equalize the pressure then open "liquid" to "liquid". As long as you have a gravity differential a siphon should start.
Iterative mash. Pull half of your base grains aside and mash those normally. Then use that as the liquor to mash the second half with the remaining base grain in all of your adjuncts.
I use an HDPE fermenter (FastFerment) most of the time and have never had a problem with oxygen ingress as long as the lid seal was snug. I'd be much more suspicious of the bottling bucket. I do a closed transfer from my fermenter to a keg, individually dose bottles with sugar solution and...
I generally don't bottle more than a couple of six packs from my keg for each batch I brew. I start by boiling a sugar solution to sanitize it at a concentration such that 5 ml contains 1 tsp of sugar. After sanitizing my bottles in the oven, I add 5 ml of the sugar solution to each. I fill...