I attempted the above hint and got as far as the Lion Installer beginning to download. The following message appears:

An error occurred while preparing the installation. Try running this application again.

I have rebooted, attempted to perform the same task using a Lion Recovery USB drive, and again from the Recovery partition; same thing every time.

Any advice would be appreciated. I am setting this up for my father as he does not have access to high speed internet.

Called Apple and the tech confirmed that the ready made $69 Apple USB drive shall now work with Mac Mini with Lion preinstalled.

Could 10.7.1 have broken this hint's ability?

When originally reading the hint, I misread something Charles had said:

Once it asks you for a disk to install on, choose the external drive or spare partition. (Or the boot partition if you're feeling gutsy. As long as you don't let the installer reboot, it shouldn't be able to install anything, but I like to err on the side of caution.)

I took that to mean that I could attempt to install on the drive from which I was currently running Lion. This does not seem to be the case. Once I prepared a properly formatted external USB HDD, I went through the steps again and they worked flawlessly. Upon exiting the installer, prior to rebooting, I inserted an 8 GB flash drive, restored the InstallESD.dmg to it, tested it by doing a fresh install of Lion onto aforementioned external HDD and it all works fine. In hindsight, I would have preferred using a larger flash drive (perhaps 16 GB would have worked?) as the destination of the install.

Thank you so much for the hint. As a result of it, I shall be mailing my father a $13 flash drive copy of Lion instead of a $70 one.