Small Batches

I was just wondering if it would hurt anything to brew say a 3-gallon batch in my 6.5 gallon fermenter. I have a can of Munton's hopped Dockland Porter that's 3.3 lbs. I want to experiment a little chilis and figured this was a good, dark robust beer to do it with since the heat from the peppers will be balanced out. Anyway, money is a little tight and the only thing I would order online would be DME to add to the kit - I have everything else. Then I was thinking what about doing a 2.5 or 3-gallon batch with just the kit. This way if my chili porter sucks I didn't really put anything into it and I'm not left with 50 bottles of it. My only concern is the extra head space in the fermenter. Any thoughts (on both the beer idea and the batch size)?

The extra headspace isn't a problem. There should be enough C02 produced by fermentation to purge the headspace of oxygen.

I like the idea of smaller batches for experiments.
Good luck, hope it turns out.

What do you think about not cutting the kit with DME? I'm thinkin it should only taste better - you probably wind up with a richer tasting beer considering the ratio of hopped extract to water
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3.3# of LME for 3 gals only gives you an OG of 1.037. Adding 1# of DME brings it up to 1.052, which is good for this beer.
I've never used a hopped extract so I can't comment on what sort of IBUs you'll get.

Gotcha. Just out of curiosity what formula did you use to get those numbers?

The calculator from tasty brew