MES cold smoker

[firefight]

Anyone out there have or tried the Masterbuilt cold smoker attachment? Thoughts? I have heatd it is really easy to oversmoke stuff and that it should only be powered on to loght the chips then turned off.

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• firefight
• Mar 9, 2017

 

[webpoppy8]

Hi I've got it.  I'm a newbie but I'm slowly raising the clue meter up.  I feel pretty comfortable with the cold smoker but haven't really filled it to max.

It's two concentric square cylinders or prisms.  The outer is a regular rectangular block with a relatively snug lid.  The inner one is narrower at the top like a pylon.  This inner box is like a chimney, except it has a top lid that blocks the smoke from escaping.  The lid is held captive by a light chain - excellent detail, I'm sure I'd have lost the thing!  There is a removable wire grid at the bottom of the 'chimney.'  This inner 'chimney' has a rectangular flange on the outside that sits in a shelf inside the cold smoker housing.  This suspends the 'chimney' over the electric heating element.  As you've probably seen, there is also a round pipe coming out a few inches from the left side to plug into your Masterbuilt smoker's wood loader port.  It has a longish metal hook hanging inside the middle of the pipe, you use the hook to grab the main smoker and snug up with a big wing nut thing. This will hold the attachment up off the ground on the smoker's side, but don't tighten too much!

To use it, remove the interior 'chimney' and load with wood chips through the top, they get piled up on the grate at the bottom, then put the top lid on.  Then rest the chimney in the main housing of the cold smoker attachment.  When you turn it on, the chips char and send smoke out the bottom of the 'chimney' into the outer wall of the attachment, and then through the pipe to the main smoker.  While the chimney gets hot, the outside stays pretty cool and the smoke is cooled within the cold smoker attachment before entering the regular smoker.

I'm pretty sure it's designed to starve the wood of oxygen so it never really "lights up."  There's little more than a few gaps for air to enter.  I do get concerned it could really start burning if you ran it with the tops open.

That chimney starts looking awfully large capacity if you try to stuff it with wood chips.  It could hold maybe a quart of them by volume.  It seems to generate a lot of smoke, so maybe that's what you heard.  Perhaps it should have a lower or pulse setting.  Since it has a regular electric heating coil, I could probably test putting a dimmer or other potentiometer to limit the voltage and the smoke.

I have been combining the bulk capacity of the cold smoker with the heat control of the main smoker.  The main smoker chip carrier can burn through a load of chips in a half hour, whereas the cold smoker, for all I know, could run for 15 or twenty hours if completely filled.

I could probably have built the cold smoker attachment by myself.  I've seen homebuilt stuff like this since joining this forum but I've got a quadrillion other things going on and it's nice not to have to build and fiddle things.

All in all, I think it's a very worthwhile attachment, whether for cold smoking, or for no-reload hot smoking.

Best,

Andrew