For soft coolers, we recommend anything in the 20- to 24-can range. That’s enough to hold plenty of ice, drinks, and food for a family of three. Anything smaller, and you end up carrying a lot of bag and not carrying much of anything else. There just isn’t enough room in those smaller sizes for them to be functional for anything except an individual lunch or a few drinks. We’ve tested Polar Bear coolers for seven years now, buying them or receiving test units from Polar Bear. For a long time Polar Bear led the way in soft-cooler designs.
Air bubbles that do not share cell walls and in effect stay insulated from one another are better at reducing the overall transfer of heat through the foam. Closed-cell foam is also much more expensive to produce coleman cooler than open-cell foam. The resulting product is strong and especially rigid feeling, and typically it weighs more than 1.7 pounds per cubic foot with more than 90% of its air cells closed to one another.
That’s important, especially if you, like most people, don’t have a freezer that can produce enough ice to fill a cooler and you tend to resort to buying bags of ice from the grocery store or liquor store. Similar to any other true roto-molded cooler, the RTIC 65 is practically indestructible, which makes it great for tougher outdoor environments. In our testing, the RTIC 65 kept ice frozen for 10 days with some periodic draining. We’ve also used this cooler for nearly five years for grocery runs in Hawaii, and it’s still going strong. One charm of the RTIC 65 is its reasonable price, which allows us to be far less careful with this equipment than we are with something as expensive or desirable as a Yeti. Beach, lake, backyard or tailgate—bring the party in comfort with our Southern Comfort Coleman Cooler.
In this instructable, I will show how I installed a ball valve on a .A cooler with a valve installed is the first step in building various equipment for homebrewing beer. Once the valve is on, this cooler can be made into a mash tun or a wort chiller. 85 quart cooler with scratch-resistant exterior, lid and floor insulation, gasket sealed lid and non-skid feet. A. Yes, a model like the 5-quart Coleman FlipLid is great for making a large ice block.
RTIC also sells a 45-quart version if you need something smaller. Only some Coleman coolers are still made in the USA, particularly their hard-side coolers. Of the coolers made in the USA, most are made in facilities either in Wichita, KS or New Braunfels, TX. Coleman also manufactures many of their coolers in China and other countries (more on that below). No matter which product you go with, rest assured knowing that you will enjoy a cooler that has many years of experience behind it and comes from brands that know what they are doing.