OK, I just have a bad feeling about this. Let me run through the things I did and maybe you can make me feel better (or worse) about it all lol.
First off, I used all of both bags of DME. Now, I could have sworn one had 0.5 lbs and one had 1 lb but the instructions list 1 lb of each and say to use 0.5 lbs of one of them (wheat I think?). I definitely used the entire contents, whatever that was.
Because my house is 76 and I feel I’ve been fermenting too warm, I put my fermenter in an ice chest with cold water surrounding it. The water actually started off around 57 (a little too cold) but I suspect the in-fermenter temp was about where it should be (low to mid 60s).
This is a 1 gal small batch, but because of the violent fermentation characteristics I’ve read so much about, I bought a 2 gal plastic bucket fermenter and used the standard airlock on top. It bugs me that I can’t see inside though…and the lid doesn’t really fit tightly. It’s flush, but I can lift it off.
Because my yield has been low, I started with more water (close to 1.5 gal) and ended up with a bit more than 1 gal in the fermenter.
OK, so that’s what I did. What I’ve noticed were no airlock bubbling, at least not that I could see…I didn’t sit there and stare at it for minutes at a time, but still. I pulled the lid at one point, and it looked like stuff was happening, and nothing smelled weird. But still. I expected more visible activity, even with the 2 gal bucket.
So…how screwed am I here?
