Episode III - Slow Smoked Beef Brisket

Alrighty up at 8:00 this morning. Wanted the meat on by 9:00. But guess what? When I looked in the pantry yesterday I had seen bouillon, but looking closer this morning it was clearly chicken. Argh! So.... a quick run to Kroger, but I got back on track and the brisket was on by 9:00.

She's a little small (are brisket's female?) but there will only be 3 of us tonight so I wanted the smallest.

Does it seem like the recipe doesn't make enough of the wet rub? Even with the small size of my cut, I couldn't cover the whole thing with the wet, so the fat side got short-changed. The dry rub was an adequate amount, but nothing extra.

My only deviation from the recipe is that I'm using pecan wood instead of hickory. The book doesn't mention a water bowl for moisture, but I decided to spray the drip pan down with Pam and then poured the remains of last nights bottle of wine in it.

Also - I was going to brag about my fancy charcoal. It's this extruded coconut that comes in these perfect briquettes. It's a renewable resource, burns with almost no odor so it doesn't compete with the wood you using for flavor, creates very little ash and burns very long & steady. However, I just started to order more last night and this morning Dennis posted a mail saying he is out. Me and my impeccable timing :-(

10:30 AM - Does it mean anything that a hawk has been circling around? Better than a vulture I suppose. Wish it would get rid of some of these dang rabbits. MG's dog seems to have made friends with them....

Looks like I managed to land right on 225 and it's keeping steady. Thanks in part to a tip from Munger2 (Start just 8 or 10 briquettes and drop them on top of the basket of charcoal. Keeps the fire from getting away from you too quick). I've got the top damper open 1/2 turn and bottom open about an 1/8th of an inch.

6:00 PM - timing not quite right and had to run to the airport to get MG. Trusting my son to pull it off at 6:30 or when the temp hits 190.

Had kind of a weird problem earlier. meat temp leveled off at 147 and stayed there for quite a while. I raised the cooker temp up to about 270, but meat temp fell to 145 after 20 minutes. Then the display started flashing so I switched batteries and maybe that helped. not sure what's going on, hopefully not hurting the meat.

8:00 PM - Check it out. Looks good. Tastes great! My son pulled it off just as instructed. Everything is swell. I noticed that there was a recipe for burnt ends on the previous page, so I am going to try that while I have the fire going.