Coffee Urn for HLT?

[BeerAg]

So, my friend's company is trying to sell their 100 cup (6.25 gallon) coffee urn for $35.

So, I was thinking, why can't this be a HLT? It keeps water between 180 and 200 degrees. You could probably regulate the temp by plugging / unplugging it.

 

[malkore]

and unless you replace all the guts and clean it well, it'll always make the water taste like coffee.

does it REALLY keep water that hot? I mean, 180 is scalding hot....with all the lawsuits out there i'm surprised it'd heat that hot.

 

[sudsmonkey]

Get it!!! You could install a dimmer switch in the power cord to control the temp. You could experiment and mark the dimmer at different temps. Bleach the crap out of that sucker, and coffee will be a flavor of the past.

 

[Beerrific]

Be sure you can clean it. Coffee is one of the hardest smells/tastes to clean IMO. Why do you think most of them are black?

 

[EdWort]

Yeah, but think of the Coffee Stout you could make!

 

[FSR402]

and unless you replace all the guts and clean it well, it'll always make the water taste like coffee.

does it REALLY keep water that hot? I mean, 180 is scalding hot....with all the lawsuits out there i'm surprised it'd heat that hot.

My guess is that it does not get much higher then 130* seeing how 150* is enough to give you 2nd deg. burns.

 

[ScubaSteve]

Hell, you might as well just do the ol' heating element in the plastic bucket. It's about the same price, you could probably reach the desired temps, and as long as you seal it properly, you're GTG.

 

[McKBrew]

Does Oxyclean work in metal? This might be a solution.

 

[david_42]

So, take your thermometer over & run a test. Unless it is just designed for serving and not a coffee maker, I'd be surprised if the temperature was under 180F.

 

[Orfy]

Go for it. It''ll should work great and you'll probably be able to mash in it if needed.

 

[camiller]

There is one spot under the peculator stem that gets really hot to shoot the water up and over the coffee grounds, the rest of the heating element is to keep the reservoir warm for serving. problem is when you take the peculator guts out it takes forever to heat up a volume of water.

Also, I have never seen one that didn't leave a metallic taste in coffee, I love coffee, but I really hate coffee from one of these things. I can't imagine it would be any better for beer.

 

[BeerAg]

I didn't pull the trigger on this fast enough, and someone else beat me to it. No big loss really, it would probabaly have taken a lot of effort to get it to work the way I wanted it to, and that spectre of metallic or coffee tasting beer didn't help any, either.