Butt on my barrel cooker

First I STOLE this idea!
Tried first with my tailgating CB-500 & it worked!
Now my big grill with a 36 X 16 cooking area is a 10+ hr smoker.
You just need a few bricks and a pan to act as a heat shield.
Make a "fuse burn" with wood chunks covered with charcoal, the one you see burned 8 hours when the full fuse is placed will last 12 hrs.
Only cooked one 7 lb butt.

It's like the Minion Method went horizontal!

Yum!!!

Brilliant and beautiful, and as Dyal says, Yum!!! By the way, Lostarrow, that camera takes marvelous pics!

Wow, that fuse burn is a very cool thing. So you put the wood chunks under the coals rather than on top of them? Have yet to experiment with this but it's on my to-do list.

Okay - I can't stop thinking about this, and now I am going to drive you crazy with questions.

1. First off - When you lit it, did you have trouble getting up to temp - or do you dump enough lit coals on the end of it to "bootstrap" the temperature of the pit?
2. Once this thing was stable temp wise, did it stay that way all throughout the burn or did you have to play with it?
3. Since you used briquettes, did you pick up any off flavor seeing that they were getting lit in that enclosed space?

That's all. I promise to leave you alone now - but the weekend approaches and I need data!

scorched_porch wrote:

Okay - I can't stop thinking about this, and now I am going to drive you crazy with questions.

1. First off - When you lit it, did you have trouble getting up to temp - or do you dump enough lit coals on the end of it to "bootstrap" the temperature of the pit?
2. Once this thing was stable temp wise, did it stay that way all throughout the burn or did you have to play with it?
3. Since you used briquettes, did you pick up any off flavor seeing that they were getting lit in that enclosed space?

That's all. I promise to leave you alone now - but the weekend approaches and I need data!

1) lit about 20 briquittes & put on end, took an hour to make 200F & peaked about 250F
2) I've used this on 4 different cookers all are stable after an hour or so, don't have to adjust once you fiqure out the correct airflow.
3) I can't tell the difference between lump & briquittes , I'm 58 & my smell/ taste isn't as good as it was??