Cpt_Kirks

Recipes 

I have seen a lot of brew setups where the HLT is a cooler. These do not appear to have any heating elements, so I guess they just hold the water and keep it hot, right?

How well do they work? Currently, I am just pouring the strike and sparge water into my MLT directly from the boiling pot.

McKBrew

Recipes 

I thought about it, but have some concerns about using a cooler as an HLT.

1) Since most sparge water is heated to 190+, there is a potential for warping the cooler. Also, if it takes awhile to get to the sparge, there might be some heat loss. Thing is, lots of people use them and they work, so what do I know.

I have a seperate burner and keggle for sparge water. The two pot/burner method works the best for me.

Parker36

Recipes 

I have a cooler MLT. It is one of those round gatorade coolers you see on sidelines of football games. Works great, can maintain constant temperature for the full hour that it take to mash. It just takes a few tries to figure out how much heat your container and grains are going to absorb so you can get your water at the right temp to pour in.

edit: Sorry, didn't read clearly, thought you were mainly talking about a MLT and not a HLT. There are people out there with electrical components in coolers.

slimer

Recipes 

After I dough-in, I heat my sparge water until it is ~10 degrees above what Beersmith tells me to heat it to. I then pour it into the HLT and start heating my mashout water. Pour Mashout water in, start a gravity fly sparge, and collect the desired volume.

No problems with warping.