Newbie question on fermenter size

Most of us frown on secondaries unless you need to age your beer on oak, fruit or bugs. So let's focus on using 1 primary vessel. If you want to do a 2 gallon batch in your 6.5 gallon bucket (most Ale Pales are bigger than 5 gallons but only hashed out to the 5 gallon mark) you can do this without a problem. After you pitch your yeast they will drive off extra O2 from the headspace and replace it with CO2. As far as I'm concerned, you're covered for about a month. This gives you time to ferment, time to let yeast clean up after themselves, and time to bottle. I usually do this by week 3 or 4.

What do you do with your second 5 gallon fermenter? Get good at brewing, make a heavy beer like a Barleywine, or an RIS, and rack that bad boy over to secondary with some cherries or some oak.

You also have room to make a 2-4 gallon batch of beer while the other fermenter is occupied. Sometimes I'll make an 8 gallon batch of beer and I'll split it down between the two fermenters. I'll pitch two different yeasts and have two totally different beers. I have to stop typing, I'm getting excited.

 

You'll need at least a 6.5 gal. bucket to ferment a 5 gal. batch. If you have 5 gal. buckets already, make 3.5-4 gal batches. Use the other bucket for bottling...IMHO, put spigots on both if they're not already there. Cheers