GF experiment #1 update

This is going to be a pretty specific and boring post for those not interested in brewing beer.
There seems to always be a short moment a few days after brewing a beer where the fear sets in. Numerous fears are graspable at any given moment, but my specific fears had to do with proper sanitation and the health of my ale yeast.

First the sanitation issue: I brewed outdoors for the first time and was constantly surveying the situation and assessing any issues. The first of which was the water bath for cooling the wort. The unsanitized water in the bin would be in direct contact with my carboy. Do I add bleach or iodine to the bath? I did not, so I'll be worried about it until I taste a non-skunked beer.

Second the health of the yeast: I realized after pitching the yeast, that the thermometer was affected by outside air temps and thus read lower than the actual temp of the wort. I ended up pitching yeast at about 80 degrees F. Scared that I'd botched the yeast pitching, I decided to wait overnight to see if there were any signs of fermentation.
Luckily, there were and the airlock was bubbling away with the release of CO2. I happily went about my day. Later this week, I checked out the beer again and noticed that the yeast was on the bottom of the carboy and not floating on top, which is characteristic of ale yeasts. Ok then...lager it is then. Except I'm fermenting above 60 degrees. Perhaps this will turn into a steam beer ala Anchor Steam Brewery?

I called Cellar Homebrew to ask about the Cooper's yeast and make sure it was indeed ale yeast and it turns out it is not all one particular strand of yeast. It could be a mixture of several, so there is really no way to know what I'm using. Oh well. I'm going to go home and see if it is still going. If it is, I'll wait until the weekend or possibly even the week after to rack to a secondary fermenter.

One thing I'm going to try that I haven't yet done is dry-hopping. I'm going to rack to numerous smaller containers for the secondary fermentation and I'm going to add in varying amounts of hops to add aroma and a tiny bit of flavor. I've got 2-1gal. containers, 1-2gal. carboy, and 1-3gal. carboy. I've also got 2 oz. of hops to work with. They say that you should figure about 1oz. of hops per 5gal. jug, so I'll probably break up the hops between the containers. One of the 1gal. jugs will be the un-dry-hopped beer. The others will get dosed differently. We'll see how that goes.

Wish me luck.