FNG

Hello all, My name is Mike and I a prosecutor's investigator/deputy sheriff from southern Ohio. I have a wife with 2 wonderful kids. My wife is a deputy sheriff and I am in my last 6 months of law school. During a break from school I decided to take up meat smoking. I have always loved to cook either indoors or outdoors but this is my first attempt at smoking meat. I have always wanted to cook this way but never really knew anything about it. Last week I was in the lawn and garden department at Wal-Mart and noticed a vertical charcoal/water smoker by Kinsford for 30 bucks so I picked it up along with a rack of beef ribs and thought what the heck. That attempt was a Miserable failure... Good flavor but tough as nails meat (I had temp issues and didn't wrap the meat)So I jumped on YouTube and did a bunch of research, long story short I picked up a Boston Butt at our local meat market and started smoking it this morning at 8am. The butt was 10 lbs so I planned on about a 10 hour smoke. Put a mustard binder on it last night with an applewood rub from the grocery store. My smoker had temperature issues all day. I had to put 3 charcoal starters full of charcoal throughout the day and seemed to constantly have to add wood chunks. I filled my ceramic water pan up 3 times as well. My temp range was from 175 to 250 but it mostly stayed in the 225 range. My internal temp of the butt got to 160 at which point I wrapped and sprayed some apple cider vinegar. I kept the temp at around 225 for a few hours and pulled the meat when the internal temp reached 197. I let it rest for 30 minutes. Some of the meat was very moist and pulled apart like butter but others were very tough. Flavor was good throughout. So I figured I would try other ways to smoke the Butt next time as I understand that this is a learning process. So anyway that's my limited smoking experience, I have a blast cooking this way (for now at least) and am already looking at better smokers maybe an offset or whatever. Any advice anyone wants to throw my way I will welcome with open arms. Thanks for listening and allowing me into the group


Mike