My first smoke and journey thereafter

Lots of pics, lots of excitement, but wanted to share this with you all and thank all of you for igniting this fire in my soul and giving me the encouragement that I needed to try new things beyond my first cook!

Wanted to share pictures of what got this magnificent hobby started for me. Was a Boston Butt at Kroger. I don't think I had discovered BBQ Brethren by then, but I KNOW I'd been watching "007bondjb" on YouTube and I'm pretty sure a lot of the inspiration to try smoking something was due to him. So, on a whim that evening, we saw a Boston Butt suuuuuuuuper cheap at Kroger, a FRESH one at that, and bought it. Spur of the moment. 13 dollars for fresh was good back then as I see now.

I'd "broken in" my girlfriend's (As of Feb 12 this year, now fiance!) Brinkmann Gourmet charcoal smoker by loading it with wood, absolutely clueless, and burning the wood down to charcoal to grill over, which resulted in DESTROYING the paint on the outside of it...:doh:

Got the Sweet n Smokey rub, which seemed fitting and is still one of my favorite local rubs, the butt, and a bag of the Kroger brand briquettes with mesquite flavor in them...and ended up getting the charcoal free because of a misprint on the shelf.

Start of the fire:


The meat:


Fire stayed INCREDIBLY hot the entire cook, and I was nervous it was going to cook too fast:


I kept dumping ice down inside to land on the coals and cool them down, and I used Dogwood for smoke flavor. Still one of my fav woods to use.

Before we took it up:


Finished product!:



To this day, it is STILL the best butt I've ever cooked. It had a really, really deep smoke ring and had an incredibly flavorful bark. I haven't been able to reproduce one this way, and I still feel more smoke gets absorbed in the smaller upright smokers than on a stickburner..although I love my stickburner. This, my friends, is what got it started for me.

Want to post a few shots along the way over the past few years:














THE DAY THE STICKBURNER CAME HOME!




This, however, gets me in trouble:

Thanks everyone! Yeah, I'm hooked. I've posted quite a few of my cooks on here since I've joined...or at least the start of my cooks anyway, and I appreciate any and all feedback. This is a great place to learn.

My smoker is indeed an Old Country from Academy, Ranch Hand coal smoker. I do use small split wood and small pieces of wood, as indicated by the wood in the pictures. The bags from Academy work really well but they've gone way up in price. I've cut split stacked some cherry and hickory, all about as big around as a beer can and about a foot long, as that's what my smoker likes to run with. Pieces about that size do well in it. That smoker and a pair of Infinity P363 floorstanders, along with a Polk PSW10, were my tax refund gift to myself after paying some things off.