Bottling Bucket for Secondary?

I have a perfectly functional 6+ gallon plastic bottling bucket with an accompanying lid and a standard glass carboy. Is it necessary for me to purchase another carboy/fermenter for successful secondary fermentation or can secondary be achieved in the bottling bucket?

When you transfer to secondary you need to have as little airspace above the beer as possible.....because you do not want oxygen in contact with beer or it can make trhe beer skunky from oxidation....this is not a problem in primary because during active fermentation the yeast creates plenty of CO2 to push the oxygen out and protects the surface of the beer (fills the airspace above in the bucket). So for secondary....if you did a 5 gallon batch of beer....you need to use a 5 gallon carboy.

Now with that being said.....a lot of experienced brewers on this site do not even do secondary (including me) as it is not necessary in most cases.....some exceptions would be for certain types of beers or for fruit additions, lagering, etc. But in general you are better off not going to secondary as you just risk contamination (infection) during the transfer. I normally keep my beers in primary 3 weeks....then bottle (as long as fermentation is done after a FG check).

What type of beer are you talking about?

wilmbrewer said:

I have a perfectly functional 6+ gallon plastic bottling bucket with an accompanying lid and a standard glass carboy. Is it necessary for me to purchase another carboy/fermenter for successful secondary fermentation or can secondary be achieved in the bottling bucket?

Click to expand...

Welcome to the forum!

You'll find that folks use all sort of fermenting vessels and many manage to brew great beers with a spartan amount of equipment. You could use the bottling bucket, but, as mgortel said, for a majority of beers transferring to a secondary vessel is an unnecessary step that risks oxidation of your beer more than providing any appreciable benefit. Check out the 2 threads linked below and cheers.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/do-i-have-use-secondary-7960/

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/when-go-primary-secondary-if-all-43014/

Thanks for the help. I'm pretty sure my carboy is 5 gallons, so what if I used the bottling bucket for primary and the carboy for secondary? I am planning on doing a hefeweizen with the addition of fresh banana in the secondary. I just wanted to see if the bottling bucket was an option before buying another fermenting device.