Jealous devil?

[DanHoo]

I'll start with this is my BGE experience, but some time back someone advised me to always put too much lump in and let the bottom vent drive the temps, and when done, shut down the grill and the remaining coal is saved for the next cook.

Here's about 5 hours of cooking at 250/275 and then an hour at 350, then snuffed out.

I would expect a Summit E6 would or could behave the same way if run this way.

 

[Brett-EDH]

JD really screwed up my cook last night, although I'm sure many will say it was operator error and is an inevitable product of lump vs briquettes. I was doing a whirlybird on my summit. What I normally do is to fill the charcoal baskets on the side of the bird as it rotates above a center drip pan. Anyway, after lighting a chimney of JD, I dumped it into the baskets and it just really struggled to keep temps high for the cook. It got up around 425 pretty quickly but then it cooled off throughout the cook. What I think happened is a result of the irregular shape of lump. I don't think a chimney full was enough heat due to the irregular size of the coals. At the end of the cook, there was just one or two big lumps in the basket whereas I usually have a decent amount of briquettes at the end of a cook.

I wound up having to finish the bird on my gasser just to get dinner on the table, which ruined all that rotisserie skin.

For those big users of JD, or lump in general, how do you get around the different sizes and getting what you need? While the product has a lot of appeal to me conceptually, I'm not really looking to hand sort through a bag of charcoal to get what I need.

to get more even sized pieces, after having lit my chimney and poured over the lump into the CBs, i usually tend to break the largest lump pieces into more similarly sized pieces. my steel rake takes 1 to 2 taps to get the larger piece to fracture. this allows me to then smooth over the pieces to firm up the CBs so i have a dense fire where all the coals are touching.

i also keep a pair of tongs at my E6. this way i can remove the super large pieces if i want to save them for a longer type cook. all depends but more often the JD pieces are fairly similar in size. the bottom of the bad is more crud when you get to that point of the bag.