Howdy Eric !
I have a curved steal baffle in the chamber at the opening to direct the heat & smoke more into the middle of the chamber. All the ash just falls down out of the basket onto the ash drawer.
I don't seem to get any coal smoke/taste from the unlit coals. Remember, using the minion method, you have unlit coals along with lit coals.
I have wondered about that though, cause when lighting the lump coal in the chimney, there is alot of black coal dust/smoke rising from the chimney until it is burning. But I don't seem to see that when adding unlit to the firebox, it just seems to start developing the "grey" around the unlit very slowly.
If it is adding this heavy black dust/smoke to my chamber, I will have no problem lighting a chimney of coals then adding to the firebox & I'll stop using the minion method.
Eric, should I stop using the minion method as well due to the possibility of this happening ? I look-up to your ideas with great pride.
I'm just a "grasshopper" compaired to you & alot of others here........
Jerry
Hi Jerry,
I was just curious if you were doing something similar to what I've tried in the past.
Heck, Jerry, I'm thinking if you've got a system down that works for you, stay with it. Every smoker and the various mods we do to them act a bit differently. The minion method was just something I never commited myself to mastering, and my smoker was modded more towards full use of the cooking grates than anything else. It just kept me pretty busing building up the fire due to the enherent inefficiencies of my tuning plate. It seemed I needed a much hotter fire for some reason, so I was adding about 2lb/hr of hot coals in order to keep chamber temps up (huge loss of heat out the vent).
I noticed your wire gap on the basket is pretty tight...I'm running more of an open gap with all my charcoal grates...3/4", so the ashes fall out naturally...seems to work pretty well, with a bit of build-up after 9-10 hours, but if I close my exhaust vent for a minute of two and give the grate a couple light taps it will drop the ash out nicely. I close the vent hoping it will stall the air flow through the smoke chamber just long enough to drop the ashes and let the air-born ash settle, then I re-open the vent.
Yeah, if the minion method works for you, by all means use it. It's much less tending, which translates to less risk of ash and likely the heavy smoke from what I've heard.
As for the heavy smoke, you'll know if it's coming on strong or not from your fire box...it's just like when you first start heating up a chimney full to get it burning. But if what you do is working well, I wouldn't make too many changes at once or it may foul-up your whole process.
Techinically you are getting "start up" smoke if you add unlit to the basket in mid smoke. A good way around this, without getting to much of a temp. spike is to light a full chimney of charcoal, let the bottom layer get good and hot, but dont let the entire chimney get lit. What this does is pre-heat the charcoal, which helps to drive out some of the gases and dust that cause that nasty start up smoke. When you dump the chimney only about the bottom 1/4 is fully lit, but the rest of it is still actually fairly hot. You will get a little bit of a temp spike, and a very small amount of start up smoke, but much less than if you dump cold unlit charcoal in.
You can do two chimneys like that and completely refill your basket in mid-smoke, works great.
Hey Johnny,
Now that you mention it, I have actually used that very method myself and have gotten good results. My brinkmann gourmet is really touchy about adding coals...it'll smoke for over 20 minutes if I add cold, so I just keep a couple pounds in a chimney ready to toss over a burner to heat up.
Thanks guys!
Eric