hey, I live in colombia south america and am having trouble finding everything I need to put together a lauter tun. I can get my hands on an overpriced picnic cooler no problem, the problem is finding food safe stuff for the manifold. thus far I've only been able to find bronze fittings for gas lines. after spending an hour in the store playing with them I couldn't put together a doable set up to drain out of the cooler. (the fittings are made with the idea that you will run lines between them, not assemble them together).
my thoughts to address this are to do a combination of the double bucket and cooler idea. essentially use a bucket with a false bottom inside the cooler and somehow setting up a way for it to sit a bit above the bottom of the cooler. it may look funny but as long as the grain sits in there I don't see why it wouldn't work. there's no reason why this won't work right? the benefit is I could also leave the drain spigot in place and double the cooler as my bottling bucket as well.
I'm going to try to get my hands on a food grade plastic bucket, if I can't how much trouble could I really be in without it being food grade? on a further note as far as fermentation vessels, right now I can only get ahold of #7 plastic jugs. The only other option I've run across is buying big (I'd say roughly 3 gallon) plastic vases. Obviously none of this is ideal or what I would want, but how bad is non food grade plastic really?