I’ve been planning to cook this brisket for at least a week or so. I’ve thought about it a lot. I prepped the meat last night. I even wrote a post about it. I’ve got this down, right? The plan was to light the fire at 7pm and let it stabilize and put the meat on at 8 or so. A friend I trust had been recommending Humphrey’s Lump Charcoal but I’d never been able to find it around here. Turns out the place I bought the brisket carries it. Proof positive it’s a good place.

So 7pm arrives and I load up the Egg for an overnight cook. I light the fuel using my usual propane torch method and the charcoal lights right up. I mean amazingly so. When you have good lump there’s a sound it makes when it first lights that sounds like glass cracking. I got that sound almost immediately. I was so blown away that I completely forgot to attach the SmoBoT temperature probe to the grate. In a mere 20 minutes I was able to get the pit temperature to 325F. Unfortunately my target temperature for overnight was 190F. I kept looking at the readout and wondering why the it kept saying the pit temperature was 60F when there was smoke pouring out the top. Well, idiot, that’s because you’re measuring the outside air temperature, not the grid temp.

It’s now nearly 9pm and I’m still 44 degrees over my target, but it’s falling. I should have the meat on by 10pm.

There’s a joke that there’s no such thing as a fool-proof plan because fools are so ingenious. Look that up and you’ll find my picture right along with it.