A few pics of the good stuff!
Here are the "ribs" after they came out of the foil.. I foiled them in Stella Artois Cidre, brown sugar, and a little bit of my rub..
I'm not sure if it was the soak in root beer overnight or not but they were falling apart at this point..
Tossed them back on with the butt and gave them a little slather with garland jacks secret six bbq sauce!
Only let go for about 30 more minutes.. didn't want to over cook them and risk drying them out.
Here they are plated with some crinkle cut fried potatoes (crinkle cut cuz im fancy)
The ribs were delicious.. (a little bit dry) Great smoke flavor and a little sweetness..
They just fell apart on the plate..
Found my new jack-o-lantern for next Halloween! :)
At this point my but has been going for 8.5 hours and was still only 170 IT so I needed another chimney to finish it.
Here she is after 10.25 hours of low and slow.. The thing that has me baffled is that this but was only 3.7 lbs.. I think it was a half butt.. It did have a 2.5 hour stall at 161ish.. And it also had a stall at 190, I'm new to this but have never seen or heard of that.. It was sitting at 190 for close to an hour and this was after about 10 hours of smoking.. So I bumped the temp quick with some chunks of wood that I let flare up.. took the temp to about 290 and the butt went from 190 to 204 in was seemed like 30sec..
I tried to pick it up with one hand and it was falling apart so I knew I had something good in my hands..
This was my 3rd attempt at a butt.. My first tasted like firewood and was super tough, my 2nd tasted ok but was chewy, but this one..
This one is freaking awesome.. I don't know if it is really that good, or just soo much better than my first two that I'm tricking myself into thinking that is really good ;) I only had one sammie last night at 3am after it was pulled and then it was bed time..
Thanks to everyone here on all the advice.. I did some mods on my Smoke Hollow before this smoke and they seemed to make a world of difference with temp control and fuel consumption.. I extended my chimney down to the cook grate and sealed all the air gaps around the lid and cook chamber.. I think the biggest difference this cook was patience.. And with the mods helping control temps, I wasn't poking prodding adjusting and worrying every 10 min...