First Attempt: The Renonwed Mr. Brown


 
J

Jason U

TVWBB Member
Tonight is smoke #5 on my WSM and I'm doing 2 7.5-8lb. boston butts following this site's Mr. Brown recipe. Put them on at 8:30 pm and hoping to pull them off a little before tomorrow's 1pm kick off for football and let them rest a bit in a cooler.

I'm really excited about this. Preparing from scratch I'll be making a traditional BBQ sauce and a mustard/vinegar/beer sauce.

Just put on the meat...hopefully the daylight savings time change won't throw things off for me. It's probably going to be in the 30's overnight so I'm worried it will burn through my fuel too quickly but I'll be up to keep an eye on things.

Did I mention I was really excited?
 
Temps steadily rising. 210 after being on an hour. I'm figuring 4am I'll get up and rotate the meat and do a mop. So worth it. LOL

edit: 10pm and lid temp is at 225 now. I realize not to trust the temp gauge here but I figure it it stays between 225-250 I'll be okay. At the flip and mop I'll stick a digital probe at the grate level if things seem to be lagging.
 
You don't need to flip or mop. The mop will actually add to your cooking time. I also expect you will be done earlier than expected.
Don't rely on internal temperature. The butts will be done when a probe/pointy thing goes in at a few different places without any resistance. Also, they may not finish at the same time.
If they do finish early (and I won't go into holding thermos), wrap them in foil, towels and place them in a cooler until ready to pull. You can easily get 4+ hours of hold time.

Enjoy !
 
Thanks for the advice James, because this is where I think I'm at. The probe is going in pretty easily now at hour 9 of the cook, and is registering about 185.

Obviously this is way ahead of schedule. The crust on this looks amazing btw.

Water pan is about 1/3 full from where I started and the coals I put in were more than enough. I'm estimating I could get another 7-9 hours with the amount that is left. I'm seriously impressed with this smoker. There's heavy frost on my grass right now (temp is in the low 30's) so I figured that would eat through the fuel quicker.

edit: Just probed at a different angle on one of the butts and it was tougher to slide in, and the thermometer dropped to 168 so it looks like there is still some cooking left to do.
 
Well, after 13 hours I decided to pull them off and wrap them in foil to rest for a couple of hours, but not before taking a quick picture.

As I was pulling them off the WSM it held together but you could easily tell they were ready to fall apart.

YT4ye.jpg
 
You can see the bone exposed on the back of the butt on the right. Hoping I can just yank that right out when I go to pull.
 
The butts have been foil wrapped and in a cooler for 4 hours now and at this point are still at 154.

I see the site recommends not going below 140 for food safety purposes so I should be okay for when guests start arriving at 12:30 or 1.
 
2 pork butts yielded 2 trays worth of pulled pork. They turned out better than I expected. The bark was amazing. The 4+ hours of rest did it wonders and I think at least an hour or two of rest will now hopefully be my goto standard.

Here's a higher res pic of my 2 butts:

7GnU6.jpg


And pulled:

OYNiE.jpg
 
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