Cooler for HLT?

Greetings,

Finally found a round 10gal rubbermaid for my MLT. In the process of looking around I saw some places online that were selling sets of cooler style MLT and HLT.

I am a little confused about the cooler style HLT. Is the idea to simply pour hot water into the cooler? I am assuming you would do this because you don't have a large enough pot to boil 10gals (or more) of water.

Am I missing something or is this pretty much the way it works with a cooler style HLT?

Thanks
TC

i'm not 100% sure, but i think those that use coolers for an HLT normally have an electric heating element installed in them.

I use a cooler HLT to hold my sparge water while sparging. During the course of a 45 minute fly sparge a metal pot would loose too much heat.

The mentioned electric heating element is not essential, but would definitely make things easier. I just heat my sparge water on my stove top and pour it into my cooler HLT.

If you want to use a pot instead you would need to heat it some how to keep your temps up.

Tom

leboeuf said:

I use a cooler HLT to hold my sparge water while sparging. During the course of a 45 minute fly sparge a metal pot would loose too much heat.

The mentioned electric heating element is not essential, but would definitely make things easier. I just heat my sparge water on my stove top and pour it into my cooler HLT.

If you want to use a pot instead you would need to heat it some how to keep your temps up.

Tom

Click to expand...

+1

It's just a holding tank for the heated sparge water. If you have two burners and two kettles, you can use one for the HLT, and if you have three burnes and kettles, you don't need any coolers at all. The coolers hold heat well, and are much cheaper than extra burners and kettles, and are usually already ported for a ball valve.

I know The Pol has a heating element installed in his. I don't use a cooler as a HLT, going with a sanke as well. I do know people with gravity-gas systems and 2 coolers will heat their water and then put it in the HLT cooler to hold it.

If you are fly sparging then a 3 pot/cooler/whatever system is very nice. For batch sparging you can get by with a boil kettle and mash tun. Just dump the first runnings into a brew-bucket while you use the rest of the water (or two sparges) to sparge the grain, then use the boil kettle for actually boiling.