Minion method vs only add lit coals?

[Odysseus]

As hobbyist chefs, we all enjoy cooking, but we each fall somewhere along a wide range of how important to us the taste and quality of our final product is versus other considerations like time, effort, ease, and cost.

For example, three of us may decide to make a cheesecake. One uses a no-bake jello mix, one mixes up a basic recipe, pours it into a pre-formed crust, and bakes it at 350 like a regular cake, and the third spends half a day on efforts like gently creaming the sugar into the cream cheese with a stand mixer to avoid over aeration, making his own butter and graham crust, and cooking it in a water bath at 250 for an additional hour. Each "chef" is happy with their results, but the quality of their final products is miles apart.

Back to smoking: I've read many say that they never add unlit coals to their firebox to avoid the initial heavy smoke and burnoff of the briquet binders. And then of course, there are many fans of the minion and snake methods, in which the ignition of unlit coals is occurring continuously throughout the cook but they reduce effort and increase temperature stability. If you are the last guy in the cheesecake analogy, where taste is king and you don't care if you have to work twice as hard, do the minion and snake methods have a possible slight negative impact to flavor or quality or is there truly no difference?

 

[noboundaries]

First, charcoal makes a difference. Royal Oak briquettes, or any of the Royal Oak store brands (Embers, Safeway, Winco, Walmart Expert Grill) have no flavor once preheated). I use a modified minion method in both my WSM and Kettle.

The secret is wood buried in the charcoal and time to allow the hot briquettes to preheat the cold briquettes and wood. Over time I've gradually moved away loading meat at an hour after fire start, to two to three hours. The color of the meat has improved dramatically, and I discovered it by mistake due to a weird schedule and a need to smoke meat.

When adding charcoal in a smoke where I want to keep temps lower, I do fire them in the chimney, but add them WAY before they are ashed over and blazing hot. I use the chimney to preheat the charcoal. Once the blue smoke disappears, they are ready to add to the disappearing pile.