So I Hacked my MES30

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SweetCosmicPope

Newbie
Original poster
May 26, 2020
6
4
So a while back I asked about getting the smoke chief and putting it on my MES30 to get better smoke output. Well I went ahead and did it (my wife got me that and a thermapro for fathers day), and I gave it a whirl for the 4th of July. Here are the results:

I got up at about 4am to start the job. I routed the probes through the vent, mounted the bbq probe right above where the brisket would be sitting about halfway up the box. While the MES30 heated up, I trimmed the brisket and I seasoned it with a simple dalmation rub. Once I was done, I loaded up the smoke chief, turned it on and let it run for about 5 minutes to fill the box with smoke. Before you ask, yes I let it run for about an hour and a half the day before to cook off any lubricants and such.

I let it run until it hit 165, then I wrapped it in peach paper and put it back. Pushed right through the stall, but it did take a good long while to get up to 200. It wound up hitting 200 right around 6:30pm

Once it hit 200, I pulled the brisket and I set it and the dripping peach paper into a dry sheet of peach paper for easier handling (but did not unwrap the wet stuff), and put it into a cooler loaded with towels. Now, the intention was to leave it for about 2 hours, but my wife's sides finished a little faster than she intended and I had a hangry family demanding beef, so I pulled it after about 45 minutes. You can see the results in my pics. My take: this was the most tender and juiciest brisket I've ever had. You did not need a knife at all to eat it, and the flavor was amazing. I would have liked a bit of a darker colored bark, but it was still nice and crisp and more importantly flavorful. I would put this up against any competition brisket and give it a run for it's money.

As far as the technical aspects here are some shortcomings I found. The smoke chief clogs pretty easily. I used traeger brand pellets (Texas beef blend) because that's what they had at the store when I went. I found the smoke start to thin out a little bit and after multiple times monkeying with it I determined two things will clog it up: 1. about halfway through the smoke, tar builds up in the output pipe and it needs to be pulled and cleaned out with the included cleaning tool, 2. the hopper is a ~2" metal pipe and if the pellets are packed too tightly in there, they just get clogged and don't fall into the heating element. Several times I had to use the cleaning tool and shove it down in there to stir them up a bit and it would be smoking like crazy again.

Overall, I don't regret the decision to hack my MES30, as the brisket turned out absolutely amazing. And now that I've had a chance to try it out, I have some tricks to make it work a little better for next time.
 

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Thanks guys! It was delicious! And since I only have a family of 3, we were eating brisket sandwiches all week!
 
What's the advantage of this over the basic mailbox mod with a pellet maze? Just curious.
 
What's the advantage of this over the basic mailbox mod with a pellet maze? Just curious.

Sorry, I JUST saw this question when I came back here to show this to one of my coworkers. My apologies! I don't know that there is much of an advantage. It's kind of the same theory. You generate smoke externally, so you can provide smoke at a lower temperature. It's two ways of doing the same thing. This biggest benefit here, I think, is that I can just load up pellets and turn the thing on and let it do it's thing, instead of having to fuss with dryer hose and igniting pellets and stuff.
 
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