Brainstorming the BGE, Vortex substitute, and the AMNPS tube

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bodbob

Fire Starter
Original poster
Jun 27, 2015
68
15
Placerville, CA
Hey All,

After reading the "Cherry Smoked Tri-tip" post that Mossy Mo posted I started wondering if I might be able to use my charcoal chimney in my BGE to do the same thing that they did with the Vortex. As it turned out I had a spare charcoal chimney that didn't have a handle yet, and it fit very tightly into the very bottom of my BGE after removing the charcoal grate. So far so good.

I filled up the chimney with used lump and briquets for this test, then decided to fill up my AMNPS tube and put that in the mix as well.

Here's what that set up looked like.

I lit up both at the same time and left the egg wide open bottom and top for about 15 minutes then closed the egg and watched the temp rise on my Maverick. (you can see the probe on the left side) I put the probe as far away from the chimney as I could to see what that temp would look like.

After about 20 minutes I had 160 degrees at grill level and decided to see if I could regulate it to a low and slow cook of 225 so I put the daisy wheel on and shut everything down to the settings I would use for a normal indirect cook at 225. The temp stabilized at 216 using those settings, but the AMNPS went out.

I relit it and decided to see at what temperature I could keep it going and stabilized. With the daisy wheel cracked about 3/16ths of an inch and the bottom damper 3/4's open it stabilized at 320 and there was lots of smoke coming from the AMNPS too.

Checking the temp of the grill right in the middle of the chimney produced a temp of 540, and at the outside edge of the chimney of

390. Here are some pics of those settings.

I moved the probe back to the outside edge of the grill and it restabilized at 330. I think this will work for cooking a tri-tip indirect out on the edge as Mossy Mo did, and finishing it over the chimney to sear it.

I'll check the length of the burn and post when I have the info. It's at 333 right now.

Cheers,

BB
 
maybe just put wood chunks in the chimney with the charcoal.... no need for the pellet smoker ... liking your test though ...
 
Thanks Jack. I might try that too, but I was interested in just how useful the AMNPS tube would be for anything other than cold smoking. I think I'm going to try Mossy Mo's cherry smoked tri-tip technique using my chimney instead of a vortex and see what happens. I just checked the egg and the grill temp in the center is 440 and dropping so I'm pretty much done at 4 hours into the burn. The AMNPS is still pumping out smoke though... I'll do a post on the results of the tri-tip smoke.

BB
 
Another thing you can do to add smoke while cooking indirect (that I did not in my cook) is to set a chunk of wood or two on the cooking grate above the chimney starter or Vortex to smolder from the direct heat. This does work very well I just forgot to do in in the Cherry Smoked Tri-Tip post.
 
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