It's a impossible to properly clean a bottle without a £2.50 bottle cleaning brush.
It's perfectly possible and indeed sensible to use domestic containers. I wouldn't be without my 3 gallon, twin-handled stock pot. This is because it has the great advantage that I can also use it as a 3 gallon, twin-handled stock pot.
Yeast starters work wonder, work wonders, work wonders.
Hop teabags split, muslin doesn't.
The easiest way to clean a syphon tube is by syphoning sterile solution with it.
Definitely do not start that process by sucking on the syphon.
It may be better to throw the yeast you have with the kit away and settle for one with known properties and prefeable one that settles firmly when working with a short basic syphon tube to ease the process of syphoning beer.
If you have a firmly settled yeast, there is nothing to stop you form using a tapped fermentation vessel to transfer the beer provided you wash the tap with sterile solution before transfer.
Cleaned and strilised beer kit tins, (the kind with the tupperware lid), make excellent hop storage vessels.
If you really want to make all these fruit liquers that they sell in one bag kits, throw the kit away and buy inexpensive spirit, the fruit of your choice and one of those storgae jars with the rubber seal that closes like the top of a Grolsch bottle. E.G. Cherry Brandy. Cheap supermarket brandy, pitted cherries, jar. Also the fruit make a lovely treat afterwards or can be added to a fruit salad to spice things up.
If making a white wine kit that demands a little suagr. Try vanilla sugar which can be made with the jars described above, sugar and a vanilla pod. Some white wines like Cab Sauv have natural hints of vanilla in their flavour which are lost in concentrating the grape juice, you can replace these in this way.
I could probably go on all week, but that's enough for now.
(...and yes I do wash and sterilise my hands).
:blink: 
