I’m intrigued by this baby…
I usually will have a full day to attend to smoking, ample yard space and I prefer both a good ring and lots of bark so I went with one of these. There’s plenty of room for lots of meat all the way up to a small whole hog and the 1/4 steel helps regulate the temperature to where it just takes a little attention every 1.5 or 2 hours and is very predictable.
I’ll just use a small load of briquettes in a chimney to start the lump charcoal and I add seasoned wood chunks, more at the beginning and taper off about half to 3/4 through, depending. We have access to lots of oak, hickory, mesquite, pecan, apple, cherry, whatever. Low and slow at 225 for packer briskets and ribs, 250 - 275 for butts and chicken and 325 for a 12 - 14 lb turkey. One trick I use is to roll and insert some gutter flashing into the exit chimney, thus allowing me to control the exit height of the heat for different height meats. I see benefit to doing a tall turkey different than a packer brisket or ribs.
I think this offset firebox with lump and wood chunks way gives the best heavy bark that I prefer. The only downside really is it’s one heavy SOB and takes some effort to get from the manufacturer to your cook site.
ETA: Oh yeah, make sure you’re able to accurately monitor your temps both in the smoker and the internal meat temp. For some smokers this ability is built in. If not there are devices you can buy, cheaply even, that’ll do this for you. But it’s a must if you want it to be perfect.
Another WSM smoker here. Love the convenience, small footprint, and ability to get long cook times. Also have a big gas grill for grilling or browning (or for finishing for the few times I underestimated the charcoal load on a cook). Sometimes I’ll do short smokes (like chicken wings) on the gas grill with a smoker box.
I went ahead and ordered the Pit Barrel Cooker. Now I just have to wait 3-4 weeks for it to arrive…
I’ll be the dissenter here…
I LOVE my Bradley Smoker. It’s an electric gadget that I use a PID controller & RTD sensor to regulate the temp within 1/10 of a degree C.
It uses odd little pucks of compressed wood chips that it loads, burns and ejects automatically- one every 20 minutes.
It’s the ultimate in hands-off smoking, and produces a fine product. Maybe not the same as a Klose pit fired with pecan logs, but I don’t have to devote an entire day/night to fiddling with it- I can set it and forget it, literally. Start it at 8 pm, 4 hours of smoke(12 pucks), and check the temps (leave-in probe & PID) before I go to bed, and then when I get up, I almost always have perfectly done brisket.
Plus, and this is important to me, I can do cold-smoking with a bit of rigging and make smoked salmon, cheese, etc… and I can hot-smoke things like sausages much easier than if I had a charcoal fired pit.
People are going to go on about the lack of a smoke ring (that reddish layer of meat under the outer crust, or bark) with electric smokers, but it’s purely for aesthetics. It’s merely a reaction between nitrogen compounds generated by burning wood/charcoal/gas and the meat; the mechanism that creates the color is very similar to that which makes corned beef red.
There are times I’d use this instead, like when you want a brisket ready to take to work with you in the morning or to feed a lunch crowd. Solution: get one of each proven kind available. 
(I have 4 cookers now, the next will be a set & forget.)
I’m a little late since SY alright ordered his smoker but I’ll chime in.
-
I will second Doctor Who’s recommendation of Amazing Ribs. He does the best job of blending the art and science of smoking. If you’re looking for a vibrant online BBQ community check out www.bbq-brethren.com.
-
I think drum/bullet smokers (including high-end like the Big Green Egg) are the easiest to operate. A pit barrel cooker is pretty much the same thing and wager you’ll be very happy with it.
-
If you’re even a little handy you can make your own drum smoker. url=http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-Your-Own-Ugly-Drum-Smoker-UDS/]I built one for about $100 and it works very well. The difference between a cheap smoker and a good one is air-tightness and drum smokers can’t be beat.
-
A drum smoker uses less charcoal because it’s tight and it can have a large charcoal basket. I’ve smoked for 13 hours without adding any fuel and still had enough charcoal for maybe another hour.
-
I’ve put together a simple drum smoker FAQ that you might find helpful.
You’ll have a lot of fun with your smoker. The downside is everybody will assume you’re the one who’s cooking at all the big outdoor parties.
I’ve built my own PID controller for my drum smoker that works almost as well. It doesn’t keep the temperature quite that tight but it’s normally +/- 5 degrees of my intended target which is plenty good enough for smoking. Plus it tweets!
I find that the biggest hassle with smoking is the clean up afterwards. There’s a lot of grease and fat.
Now, electric smokers are fine, but the good charcoal fired ones can be set-and-forget, too. On my wedding day, in the morning I fired up the WSM and threw in a brisket. Went to church, got married, had a lunch reception, and by the time we got home for the after-party, the brisket was done. The main modification I have is sand in the pan instead of water, so I don’t have to worry about refilling it during the smoke. I’ve also used it similarly for overnight smokes.
Thanks for that FAQ, Deeg.
pulykamell, why does sand work better than water?
Sand v. Water? You might as well ask PC v. Mac or Chili: Beans or no Beans? It’s one of those BIG questions that inspires much argu— discussion.
Advantages of water: heat sink (water only gets so hot - 212 degrees). Also may keep your meat moist depending on how you like it. You can put apple juice or other flavored liquids in there. Disadvantage: boils off and you have to refill it or see your stable temperature rise. This can result in disaster if you spill all over your coals.
Advantages of sand: stabilizes the heat - especially in cold environments - don’t have to refill. Keeps the smoking environment dry if that’s how you prefer it (you can always mop or spritz the meat with liquid if you want to). Disadvantages: can get hotter. Some people prefer putting flavorings in the water for an additional layer of flavor - can’t do that with sand.
It’s unanswerable. I have used both, but switched to sand because I like to let my smoker get a little bit hotter and then I choke it down with the air controls.
It doesn’t evaporate. It works better in the winter to stabilize the temperatures and keep the cooker running hot. I think the smoker runs about 15 degrees or so hotter with sand rather than water, but that’s no matter to me, as I prefer slightly higher temps in my smoker. 250-275 is ideal for me. It’s also easier to maintain a steady cook as you don’t need to refill it during the cook. (I don’t know exactly the difference in temps, as I don’t use a thermometer, generally, when I smoke. Anywhere from 200F-300F in the smoker is fine with me, and I’m not anal about keeping a precise, steady temperature. That kind of stuff just doesn’t interest me.)
I have not noticed any difference in moistness of meat whether using water in the pan or sand in the pan. The end result, from what I can tell, is exactly the same. The more humid environment does not contribute to interior moisture of the meat. You would also think that the water pan would inhibit bark formation because of moisture, but I haven’t noticed that either. Bark forms fine whether using water or sand. And using flavored liquids in the water pan, IMHO and experience, contributes nothing to the flavor of the meat. It’s just a waste of perfectly good apple juice or whatnot. If you want to infuse the meat with apple juice, splash it in your sauce or add a little apple juice to your pulled pork after you pull it and toss it.
Basically, what it comes down to, is that it’s a whole lot easier/more convenient for me to deal with sand in the pan than water, and in the winter it has the advantage of working better in terms of keeping the temps where I want them.
Here’s the first thread I found about apple juice or whatnot, in the water pan. The first few posts seem to say that some people notice something, and as the thread progresses the naysayers (like me), say it’s pointless.
Anyhow, the nice thing about barbecue is that you can experiment and form your own opinions. Don’t listen to me. Try a smoke with water in the pan; try one with apple juice; try one with beer and water; etc. If you consistently notice a difference, then do it with the flavored liquids–you’re picking up on flavors that I don’t. It’s certainly possible that you have more sensitive taste buds. I’ve tried it that way, and the subtlety was completely lost on me.
It’s all very interesting. The UDC that I ordered doesn’t have a water pan (I guess no UDS do?) so that shouldn’t be an issue for me. They don’t even recommend wood chips. Just straight Kingsford briquettes. I’ll experiment with hard wood chunks at some point, but the point of this particular design is simplicity so I will do as they recommend and see how it goes.
This is one reason why I recently moved my (rain) water pan from the firebox to inside the cooking drum. I since noticed two additional benefits, it doesn’t evaporate as quickly and, most importantly, it creates an actual darker horizontal line across the well-seasoned barrel that confirmed for me exactly how the heat dissipates as it moves from the source over to the chimney.
Per pulykamell’s comments I’m curious about the sand and will give that a try sometime soon too.
I meant UDS, not UDC…
Mine sucks when running on Fahrenheit- apparently the controller keeps the temp within a few increments of whatever you set it on, and it only does Fahrenheit in whole degrees, so it’s off by 2-3 degrees all the time. It does Celsius temps in 1/10 degree increments, so it keeps it a lot closer to temp- usually with a half-degree C.
It also seems to get better with time- the literature on it has something to do with fuzzy logic and artificial intelligence, etc… but doesn’t really explain it.
My PID controller I have it rigged up to control a 25 amp Solid-state relay that’s spliced into an extension cord.
Yeah, you do not use wood chips in those types of smokers. (I rarely use wood chips for any reason myself–very occasionally on a grill, I’ll use them.) Use chunks (and don’t bother soaking them.) For a brisket, I’ll use something like 6 fist sized chunks of oak and 2 of hickory. It’s not really “smoking” if you don’t use the wood, in my opinion, but I do charcoal-only barbecue from time to time myself.
So the smoker you bought I assume has the meat directly over the coals, just high up? That’s another thing the pan accomplishes: it keeps the fat from dripping into the fire. I like the fat-in-the-fire flavor, so sometimes I smoke without it, but it’s a different flavor that smoking/barbecuing something without the fat dripping directly into the fire.
Yes, from the amazingribs website:
One thing I will tell you about: don’t get stressed out about temperatures too much. You want to keep them in a general range, but peaks and spikes over a long cook will not kill the final product. Sure, you don’t want it to be in there at 450 for hours, of course, but the occasional flare-up to 400 (which shouldn’t really happen on your set-up) and then dip into 200 will not kill the barbecue. You just generally don’t want to err on the side of keeping it too hot (for me, over 300F) for too long. As long as the bulk of your cook is in the 200-275F range, you’ll be fine.
A few years ago we made a make-shift smoker out of cinderblocks and random crap we found lying around. It was an ugly, terrible mess of a smoker, fired by wood logs only, and horribly inefficient. We had to add logs about three times an hour. Temperatures were all over the place, from 150F to 450F at times, when we forgot to add wood, or added too much, but we probably averaged around 250. We rotated the four shoulders (and the next year we did four plus two briskets) every so often. And you know what? It all came out fine. Some of the finest barbecue I’ve ever made.