Yeah, I had heard that too, but having used water and sand, I don’t think it really makes that much of a difference, if at all. The main purpose for water/sand is it functions as a heat sink / temp regulator, and the only difference really is the internal barbecue temp tends to run a bit hotter with sand (which, in colder months, gives sand the advantage).
You might think that’s the case but, no, from my observation the water doesn’t do anything for keeping the meat moister, or, if it does, the effect is negligible. You still get a nice bark (crust) when using the water pan, so it doesn’t do much for keeping the outside moist, and the inside, well, it makes no difference at all as far as I could tell to how moist the meat is. Both water and sand make perfectly moist meat if you do it correctly.
Remember, most old-school barbecue joints just use wood or a mix of wood and charcoal and don’t have any sort of water anywhere in the process, except maybe for extinguishing flare-ups.
Similarly, some cooks pour other liquids into the water pan like apple juice or beer or whatnot, but that’s just a waste of perfectly good beer, IMHO. When I started, I tried some of those and it didn’t make a lick of difference in terms of flavor.
I use a Pit Barrel cooker. (http://pitbarrelcooker.com) Simple to use. Can be used with charcoal alone, or with wood chips too. I have been using mine for 4 years and love it. The vertical hanging system allows for large quantities in a small footprint. Highly recommended.
Comparing notes, it sounds like our barbecuing paths have been very similar 
I’ve owned a few electric smokers that I’ve modified to one degree or another to work the way I want. While I’d love to have one of those giant, wood-burning offset smokers like I’ve admired in all the Franklin Barbecue videos, the reality is that I need something that doesn’t need continual presence to keep running in the sweet spot.
So I’ve become a fan of inexpensive electric smokers plus a few key mods. You know, the small refrigerator looking things like the Bradley or the Masterbuilt. Both have oven-like heating elements in the bottom of the cabinet. The Bradley feeds wood pucks into the burner every twenty minutes, meaning you can leave it alone for a few hours at a time depending on how many pucks are in the feeder. The Masterbuilt has a tray above the heating element for wood chips, so you have to keep a closer eye on it as it does not self-replenish.
In either case, I buy the cheapest, non-digital model as I have found even the fancy units are not very precise with the temperature control. Instead I build or buy a PID controller to keep the temperature correct to something like plus or minus two degrees. Once that’s in place, I know that the temperature will be spot on for the 12-18 hours I might be cooking. Problem #1 solved.
The other issue is the smoke generation. Because I like to cold smoke (cheeses, fish, bacon) as well as hot smoke (brisket, pulled pork, etc) I need to keep the heat from the smoke generation separate from the cooking heat or lack thereof. With the Bradley, there’s a way to remove the smoke generator and puck feeder from the cabinet and duct cooled smoke in, but I didn’t like that solution as much.
Instead, I followed the trail already blazed by some inventive folks on the forums. I took the wood chip tray and all its hardware out of the Masterbuilt and ran some sheet metal ducting to of all things, a mailbox. I then burn pellets in the mailbox, and the smoke cools quite a bit on the way into the cabinet. Then I can set the cabinet temp to whatever I want without the heat of the burning pellets cooking things I want to remain cool.
It sounds weird, it for sure looks weird, but it works really really well. And because I bought everything on sale, I only spend $200-$300 bucks on a fully automatic smoker that I can let run unattended (away from flammable stuff of course) all night. And it’s a big cabinet. I can smoke multiple briskets or pork bellies easily. Love it.
While not as easy as your set-up, the Weber Smokey Mountains don’t need a lot of baby sitting at all. In fact, the pork shoulder I did for my kid’s birthday party this past weekend consisted me of starting the fire early in the morning, throwing on the shoulder, and then pulling it when it’s done. Absolutely no added coals, nothing. Not even a thermometer in the cooking unit. With the sand in the water pan, it’s usually at around 265-ish in cool weather. (When I used water in the pan, you did have to check on the water pan so it didn’t go completely dry.)
And that’s it. About 7 hours later, my pork shoulder was good to go. I did very occasionally probe the meat to get an idea of where it was at and how much cooking time I could expect, because it varies by the meat.
On my wedding, right before I got dressed, I fired up the WSM and filled it as well as I could with coals and wood and threw in a full brisket (point and flat aka “packer cut.” .) Must have been around 7 a.m. or so. Completely unattended cook, no foiling just brisket on the grates. We had a morning ceremony and lunch reception and finished up around 4 p.m. Came home (about a 30 minute drive), smoker was on its very last coals. Checked the meat temp, it was in the 190s, meat looked juicy and had that characteristic “sag” when the meat is done. Rested that puppy wrapped in foil in a cooler for two hours and, bam, nicely done brisket.
What meat thermometers (if any) do you folks use?
I use this wireless one, and have been very happy with it. The same company also makes dual-probe units (for measuring two meats, or one meat and the oven temp) that are a little more expensive.
I also have simple digital unit kinda like this one, for quick measurements.
Heh, that’s what I thought, too. 
Those look pretty nice. I’ve been meaning to buy a remote thermometer to replace an old one I broke about ten years ago, but just haven’t gotten around to it. I just use a Thermapen to check on progress.
I’ve got the older version of the Tappecue, which has 4 probes and is WiFi enabled so I get alerts on my phone even if I am out and if the smoker flames out.
That’s good to hear. I don’t really want to spend the money for a pellet smoker, at least for just starting out, but I liked the idea of something that I wouldn’t need to constantly babysit. I was leaning towards the Weber Smokey Mountain already based on the numerous recommendations here and it seems to be one of the highest rated smokers of its type on other review sites. But I was slightly worried I wouldn’t want to use it as much if it turned out to require too much time tending to the coals. But if it really doesn’t that’s reassuring. It sounds like especially if I use the Minion Method (I did look it up – thanks for that advise) it would reduce the workload.
I’d definitely get one of those pellet smokers where the computer does the hard parts for you. It’s so easy and that means you’ll use it.
All my (wealthy) neighbours have auger-fed pellet smokers (Traegers) and they LOVE them. They’re dead simple to operate and it’s mostly a ‘set it and forget it’ operation.
I don’t know if I’d recommend them for a dead beginner, though. I think they’re pretty pricey.
Yeah, pick up that Gary Wiviott book I linked to back there. His lessons are very much geared to the WSM (it’s based on a web page he had for smokers maybe back about 10-15 years ago), although he also has notes on offset smokers and Kettle grills. He’s a fairly opinionated barbecuer, but if you follow his 5 steps, you will learn fire control pretty well so that you can transfer your skills on to any other type of smoker. One year we went to visit a friend in Iowa and made a giant (temporary) cinderblock smoker from scratch to smoke 4 pork shoulders and about 15 pounds of hot links and much of what I learned from that book was put to use in engineering it and managing the fire and cook. No automation here! First post here has pictures of it and my description.
Now that was not a hand-off cook, as the structure was fairly leaky (airwise) and required constant additions of wood into it to maintain temp (we needed to reload logs every 30 minutes-ish.) But it was an all wood/no charcoal cook, and the food turned out perfectly. And much of it was helped by learning the basics and theory of barbecuing from that book (Low & Slow).
My smoker is a repurposed 55 gal. malt extract drum. The exhaust stack is a cut-off semi exhaust and the firebox is repurposed steel from the school’s auto shop. It will do 4 full briskets if I’m willing to crowd them a little and I’m feeding a crowd, but I’ve never done more than 2 at a time. When I fire that puppy up the whole neighborhood knows it! Set it and forget it is all well and good, but I like playing with my meat.
This is what is on my deck right now.
A Brinkman electric smoker that looks like a mini fridge. It actually worked very well, but didn’t handle the weather well and the tube that held the wood chips froze up and was very hard to remove. Also, since it is kind of a one trick pony it is easy to smoke something for Thanksgiving and forget to clean it out until several weeks later. It now serves mostly as a shelf while using the other grills.
A classic Weber Kettle charcoal grill. It is a classic, but takes work getting it set up and maintaining the proper temps.
A Weber propane Genesis grill. Easy to get going, easy to control the temps and indirect heating. Needs a separate wood box which is a pain to try to refill on a long smoke, but will also fire up blazing hot for a great sear.
A Traeger pro 780 wood pellet grill. Simple to use, easy to control, can be used for more than just smoking. Lots of various wood choices. Downsides… expensive and doesn’t get quite hot enough for a good sear. My solution is using the Traeger to cook/smoke and the Weber propane to finish.
My favorite is the Traeger, but if I honestly had to recommend just one, the Weber Genesis is probably the one to go for.
Ah, Brinkmann! That’s the brand we used to have.
I REALLY wanted a BGE when I lived in China. So much so I bought my brother one when visiting for 2 weeks one summer. I went to town on it for those 2 weeks. 20 years later it is still in my brother’s back yard. We used it at Thanksgiving to roast a goose.
Just sanity checking if you’re up for a BGE? I don’t mean to rain on your parade, but they are expensive and an *event *to use. The whole premise is that a BGE is a giant ceramic thermal mass. It takes a long while for the ceramic to absorb all the heat. Once it does, then maintaining temperature is pretty easy. You play with the bottom airflow and the top airflow once it is at temp. But, heating that sucker up takes a “while” and constant monitoring of the airflows.
My bro has a regular gas grill next to the BGE. He uses the gas grill probably 19 out of 20 times just 'cause it’s easy.
Ya, I’ve got my propane grill when I want something quick and I’ve got my Santa Maria style for doing whole pigs down to smaller bbq in the 1-4 hour range. When I get the BGE it will primarily be for 12-24 hour smokes.
Sure I’ll only use it 3-4 times per year and its a ton of money for such little usage but that’s why I don’t have one sitting on my deck currently but this year is looking like it’ll be within a reasonable spluge.
I picked up a Masterbuilt smoker last summer. Not the greatest quality smoker, but it was on sale and I got it for just over $100. Have had a great time using it and experimenting with it.
I’ve found that with a lot of things, particularly vegetables, you don’t really want to actually cook in the smoker, but rather just use at the end of cooking to impart a smoky flavor. Like carrots; I smoked carrots at 200F for an hour and they never cooked, they just turned to rubber. The second try I boiled them until they were cooked, then I threw them in the smoker for just 15 minutes. Came out super smoky and delicious.
I’m still working on how to smoke chicken without turning the skin to rubber. Remove it? Brine? Baste while smoking?