surface area of fermenting liquid?

[bauglir]

I have a one-gallon carboy and a two-gallon plastic fermentation bucket that both came in an into beer-making kit. I'm doing primarily wild-fermentation brews (from home-pressed cider, raw-honed-based mead, etc). I read in Katz's The Art of Fermentation that it's best to put your nascent brew into something that ends up with your liquid having as little surface area exposed to oxygen as possible (even with an airlock) to prevent acetobacter from growing. So I'm wondering how much you think this matters in general? Is this primarily a thing when dealing with wild yeast brews when the equipment hasn't been meticulously sanitized the way one would when brewing beer/wine/what-have-you that's either pasturized or been heated to a level where no wild yeasts could incubate/grow and then inoculated (or whatever the technical term is) with commercial yeast? There seem to be a lot of cylindrical buckets without tapered tops out there made for brewing... Does it have to do with primary vs secondary fermentation?

Just getting back into brewing after many years so sorry if this is a silly question!

 

[Yooper]

It matters once fermentation slows down and less c02 pressure is coming out of the beer/wine/mead. Generally, for wines and meads I move out of the bucket into an airlocked carboy with little headspace when they reach about 1.010 or so. Sometimes it happens fast, and it goes further, but generally that's in about 5 days. For beer, I tend to keep the bucket closed and airlocked until packaging at about day 10-14.

 

[rsquared]

Acetobacter is not the biggest issue, it's really oxidation that you need to worry about. As yooper alludes to, anything that will be sitting around bulk aging for a while (typically wine and mead) should be moved into a vessel with as little headspace as possible once fermentation is complete, or possibly even as it's winding down and you don't need the extra space of a bucket. If you're not going to age in bulk (most beer or cider) then moving to the smaller vessel is unnecessary, and only adds another possible vector (however small) for introducing some sort of contamination.

 

[bauglir]

Thanks for the responses! So the general takeaway is that if it's something that takes longer to brew/ferment, switching is best, but for something with a shorter fermentation period like beer I can just keep it in the bucket for the entirety of the process until I bottle it?