Little Experimental Fermenter

I love to experiment in my brewing. When I first started writing my own recipes, I would brew more unique beers. While I'm happy to say that a lot of my experiments went well, some didn't. When I had more time and money wasn't as tight, I loved to experiment. But given the current beer costs and my obligations outside of brewing, I'm less willing to take risks because I'm fearful that I might end up with a bad beer that used up a lot of my time and money.
But the creative side of me can't be content to just brew the standards, so I've come up with a minor solution. I bought a 2 gallon fermenting bucket at Midwest brewing for $5. I already had a 3 gallon carboy, so it works out perfectly. I recently brewed a new version of Green Beard IPA, but I had also wanted to experiment with a Mango IPA. So I split the batch, 3 gallons of the Green Beard, and in the 'lil' fermenter, roughly 2 gallons of IPA sitting on top of some mangoes. I blended 3 mangoes and froze them as ice cubes (which makes surprisingly little).
Next up, I'm brewing La Vaca Milk Stout, I had wanted to experiment with using cranberries in the secondary for a milk stout, so I'm going to do the same procedure, transfering about 1.5-1.75 gallons into the bucket on top of some cranberries, while kegging and bottling the remainder of the batch.
I think this will be a good way to test out some experimental batches that could become 5 gallon batches in the future. At the same time, if I'm spending the time and money, I'll still be getting around 3 gallons of a good, drinkable beer. Should be fun!
More to come...
Salud!
Bearded Brewer