I Bought The 18.5 WSM

[dward51]

I'll second Craig on using a Guru on an overnight smoke.  You can set it, and sleep a full 8 hours without worrying about the WSM temps.  Done it many a night.

Yes, you can get good steady temps out of a "plain" WSM without one, but if anything changes, you have to adjust the vents.  With the Guru, the computer takes over and handles it for you while you sleep soundly.  I did use my Maverick also for the first few extended smokes, but once I was confident in how the WSM and Guru combo would work, I don't bother with the Maverick anymore. They do make a remote model Guru's now.  The Procomm model was pricey and I don't know that much about the new networkable unit.  I have a plain old DigiQ-2.

A plus of the Guru over the Auberns model posted earlier is with the Guru you also get food temp monitoring and an alert when your set food temp is reached.

By all means, use the WSM "plain" for a while to learn it, but once you try a Guru, you will wonder how you ever got along without one. 

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• dward51
• Dec 5, 2011

 

[kryinggame]

So tonight, I smoked a rack of St. Louie rib in my WSM.  I used the same method that I would normally use in my MES:

1- Jeff's rub;

2 - 3 hour smoke;

3 - 1 hour foil (Using the Jonny Trigg method);

4 - 45 minutes un-foiled.

For the smoke, I used a 1/2 chimney of unlit charcoal and 1 full chimney of lit charcoal. and about 3 chunks of apple wood.

Good lord, that was a great rack of rib (no q-view, ya'll know what ribs look like).

Previously, I've done numerous racks of ribs in my MES but something was always missing. I think this was better because it was smoked the traditional way--charcoal and wood.

Now, the temperature was in teh upper 50's and the wind was blowing good.  My WSM kept constant at 275* for 7 hours---then it quickly started dropping.  I'm not trying to start an argument here but the WSM is known to keep constant temperature which is set it and forget it.  Quite honestly, I can't justify a Guru because the WSM naturally does the job of the Guru and similar gadgets.