I’m having an outdoor event. I’d like to serve a hot beverage – coffee, tea or hot chocolate. The crucial need is to transport gallons of near-boiling water to the event site and keep it hot all the while. I thought to myself, why not just pour the boiling water right into my Coleman Polylite 34 “cooler,” clamp on the lid, and be done with it? But would it work? Is an “ice chest” able to hold scalding water safely? Anybody know?
Probably, but if you do manage it, wrap some belts around the cooler to make absolutely sure it won’t open. It’ll be heavy and if it tips and opens, somebody’s gonna get seriously burnt.
I’d be more worried about clamping the lid shut if you have any significant airspace left over; expanding gas volumes will make that a hairy proposition at best. I got this travel mug with a sealed lid, and anytime I have hot coffee in it, it pops back open, unless I fill it up to the very brim. But all the same, I wouldn’t recommend it, though it’s a very inventive use of a cooler.
Why not just use a portable stove and heat the water?
In the amount of time it takes to travel to wherever you’re going from home and then serve (open and close and open and close and open and close the lid) it’ll be tepid at best for the second half of the water. And probably dirty (ever see the ice in a beer cooler halfway through a campfire party? I dare you to drink it).
A coleman or even a few pots on a campfire will do you fine.
And you won’t be drinking tepid tea or tipping boiling water off your tailgate like you’re protecting a castle.
A lot of serious accidents occur when people try to use the wrong tool for a job, and this sounds like a text book example. I’d say the risk of spilling boiling water with this sort of misadventure is remarkably high, and with that volume of water there’s a potential for catastrophic – even fatal – injury.
One approach would be to buy a five gallon cooler like this one which you can get for anywhere from $10-$40, depending on the quality. The risk of spilling is still there, however, and you need to keep in mind that five gallons of water weighs 40 pounds. If you have to move the cooler more than 20 yards, I wouldn’t recommend this either.
I’ll second the notion that the best option (and the only safe one, in my mind) is to heat the water on site, using a simple camping stove.
I’d be worried about destroying the plastic. You will probably leach out plasticizers at that temperature if you don’t completely melt it anyway. As the others have mentioned, the risk of dumping boiling water out is very high. This is a very bad idea.
Contact a party supply rental place and spend a few bucks to rent one of the big insulated thermos bottles they use to serve coffee and such. The Salvation Army and Red Cross use them all the time at disaster sites. Kind of look like half kegs. The lid latches down and it has a spigot on the side. They hold quite a bit. Might need two.
Never mind about melting the plastic, leaching out plasticizers, or spilling boiling water all over the poor mope who kindly volunteers to help you tote it from the car to the site because he doesn’t quite grasp how heavy it is until it’s too late (36 quarts or 9 gallons of water weighs about 75 pounds): it’s the hygiene. If I were at your event, and I observed that you were making hot chocolate for your guests with hot water dipped out of your Coleman cooler, I’d have a serious hygiene bone to pick with you. At the very least, I’d politely pass on it. I’ve seen people use their Coleman coolers to transport all kinds of things I wouldn’t want in my mouth, up to and including dead animals to the taxidermist. Even a standard package of bologna tossed into the cooler for a picnic can have bacteria on the wrapper, which then presumably get into the cooler, and which then get onto anything else that’s put into the cooler.
So people at your event would probably for the most part be like, “Meh, no thanks”, and you’d get home with your 20 boxes of Swiss Miss completely untouched.
You remind me of my wife when she freaks out over letting our dog clean up one of our dinner plates. After all, they can be washed and sanitized. It’s not unusual to do this with coolers, and sanitation is quite easy to accomplish. Case in point: I’ll be using my picnic cooler early next week to brine my first turkey. At some point afterward, I won’t hesitate to use it for, say, cans, bottles, and ice for consumption.
OK, but would you trust someone else to have done the same with their cooler?
Mr S. and I used the leftover ice water in our cooler to soothe our hot, dirty feet after a long camping weekend. We’ve washed it, but I wouldn’t say we’ve sanitized it. Then again, we don’t store food in direct contact with it. Still wanna dip some ice water out of it for your drink?
(FWIW, we do let our dogs lick plates, and then joke that the plates are so clean that we could put them right back in the cupboard. Then we wash them, duh.)
Wouldn’t the 9 gallons of boiling water address this issue?
I’m with Christopher on this,i.e.,concerned whether the material would handle the temp. without leaching plasticizers.Doesn’t mean I can’t be wrong,but anything designed for cooling isn’t ipso facto designed for boiling water.
The sanitation concerns can be handled easily.Perhaps you should contact the manufacturer with the concerns? Likely they have addressed such tort.
I’ve heard a lot about using coolers in homebrew circles, although I can’t remember exactly why (it didn’t interest me at the time). It definitely including boiling-hot wort, though. The coolers in question were designated for beverages, though. They’re the kind you see on construction sites for cold water in the summer.
A great many plastics soften at high temperature, and most release solvents.
Nearly boiling water… For a short time (not boiling water for several minutes). Then it begins to cool quite rapidly toward the 98.6 degree range (that “infecting us” sweet spot for bacteria).
Get water hot… pour into ice chest… Get water hot… pour into ice chest… Lots of surface area there… Its steaming a lot… Means lots of heat is coming off that… Close lid… Swish slosh… some pretty hot water gets on the lid… not much… slosh slosh…
Hey Bill! Pretty good hot chocolate… Got any more hot water, though? This one isn’t as hot as the last one." Ecoli outbreak.
How’s that for a family picnic?
As has been suggested previously in this post, the real question is what temperature ranges is the plastic used to construct this “cooler” designed for. In all reality, most plastics are not designed to weather 100[sup]0[/sup] C temperatures for very long. At the very least, it could cause the plasticizers to “phase separate” even if they don’t leach into the drink. This would destroy the plastics function for future use.
I just emailed the following to Coleman via their website. I’ll let you know the reply I get, probably sometime tomorrow:
“I’ve heard a lot about using coolers in homebrew circles, although I can’t remember exactly why (it didn’t interest me at the time). It definitely including boiling-hot wort, though. The coolers in question were designated for beverages, though. They’re the kind you see on construction sites for cold water in the summer.”-Balthisar
The use of coolers in home brewing is during the mashing stage,where temps between 150-160F need to be maintained for protracted periods to convert starch to fermentable sugars.Wort boil is subsequent,in a kettle.I’ve used coolers to mash my homebrew, so they can definitely handle temps in the 150 range for hours.
If I observed that you were using a cooler to dip water, whether hot or cold, out of a cooler to serve directly to folks, I would have hygiene issues with you, because, as Scarlett points out, I don’t know you, and I wouldn’t have any way of knowing where your cooler had been, or what it had had in it just before you decided to use it for my tea water. For all I know, you had just used it to transport dead squirrels to the taxidermist, and thought that a quick rinse with the garden hose constituted “sanitation”.
Also, merely exposing a surface to boiling water does not automatically destroy the staph bacteria on it. Cite.