00;00;00;22 - 00;00;09;09
Speaker 1
If your pit has hot spots and uneven temps, this is why. Stay tuned.

00;00;09;11 - 00;00;35;25
Speaker 1
Welcome back, barbecue nerds. I'm Frank Cox, and on today's episode we're talking about understanding draw. This is my opinion is one of the most misunderstood terms in barbecue. Now you'll hear a lot of different explanations. And, a lot of assumptions on how air moves in your pit. And if you were listening to our last episode, we kind of dipped our toes in the water a little bit, talking about it.

00;00;35;28 - 00;00;59;00
Speaker 1
But on this episode, now that we understand heat and how heat moves through your pit, now we're going to talk about how air carries that heat and what it does inside your pit to help you get even temperatures. Now, first, before we go into like what to do, let's talk about some some misconceptions and assumptions that you're going to run into.

00;00;59;03 - 00;01;25;17
Speaker 1
A lot of these things are very frustrating to new people that are that are getting into running cookers like offsets. Even vertical smokers have a this this affects gravity. Gravity feeds, you know, vertical offsets any kind of pit like that as well. But for the sake of common conception, we're going to be talking about horizontal offsets primarily in this conversation.

00;01;25;19 - 00;01;49;23
Speaker 1
Now, before I get into the meat of the conversation, if you don't mind, when this episode wraps up, please leave us a review. Now, stars are great, I appreciate that, but if you don't mind, give us some words along with your review specifically that tell us exactly what you want to cover. I put a lot of effort into these episodes, and I want to make sure that these are contextual to your actual situation.

00;01;49;25 - 00;02;14;02
Speaker 1
Anyway, getting right into this. So what happens is, is that we get into barbecue and we build our first fire and we run the pit. And you're going to have two situations. It's either going to run low temps and you're going to have a hard time getting it running and getting the cook chamber up to a cook, a bowl temperature, or you're going to be running super hot.

00;02;14;04 - 00;02;41;23
Speaker 1
If this is your first time and you've experienced that, don't worry about it. It's a completely natural thing. It's kind of like getting in a car for the first time and being told, put your foot on the gas, you're either going to go really slow or you're going to go really fast. This is normal evolution in barbecue. So but one of those things that we're going to have to deal with first is we're going to have to acknowledge the frustrations that you guys are dealing with, especially when it comes to these horizontal offset smokers.

00;02;41;25 - 00;03;09;24
Speaker 1
So some of those things might be uneven temps like especially the temperature left to right. You know, we'll wind up with some stagnant air. You've heard me in the last episode. Talk a little bit about that when it comes to, like white smoke especially, you'll you'll see the smoke color will change. You'll also have, like, this over smoked flavor in that scenario.

00;03;09;27 - 00;03;38;05
Speaker 1
You know, weird swirling smoke patterns, at different spots in the grate. One of my favorite things to look at on offsets is two things under the meat, especially on, the more modern offsets we're building that usually have one layer of cooking grates in them and bigger pits. Like if you look at the the color of your meat, especially briskets like tilt them up and you'll see it'll be gray.

00;03;38;07 - 00;04;01;23
Speaker 1
And if it's running real good, it'll be like a red color. But you're almost never going to see the same bark on top as you, on the bottom as you would on top, in these offsets. So this can be some of that weird swirling smoke patterns that are not necessarily putting the air where it should go. Another spot to look would be like hot spots you can't solve.

00;04;01;25 - 00;04;29;17
Speaker 1
For instance, the most common one is up against the firebox, but an even more common one that most people don't worry about that can affect your color and tenderness is by the collector box. If you have an offset smoker that pulls the air down to the great level before it goes out. Usually tell me if I'm wrong, but the back left corner that's the area away from the cook chamber door side that you're standing on and all the way to your left.

00;04;29;18 - 00;04;58;10
Speaker 1
The back left corner seems to be the sweet spot. If you've got something you need to nudge along a little bit, this is usually the best place to put whatever that is. Another one is is that we're taught by just conversations in Facebook groups and, watching Facebook or YouTube videos and, other content we've consumed on the internet that air should swirl through a cook chamber, almost in a corkscrew like fashion.

00;04;58;13 - 00;05;24;06
Speaker 1
As a matter of fact, that's mentioned in a couple of different, books that I've got upstairs, from famous Pitmasters. They actually show illustrations of two colored arrows, usually a yellow and a blue or something like that. Swirling like a corkscrew against each other as they go down the length of the offset cooker. Also, air should flow under the grate is another assumption that's made.

00;05;24;09 - 00;05;48;24
Speaker 1
Like we go to great efforts in pit design. A lot of people do to push air down and make it do something it doesn't necessarily want to do. So those are those are a lot of things that are assumptions that are made that cause a ton of frustration to new pitmasters. So one thing I'll tell you is I got to give a shout out to my buddy Cosmo.

00;05;48;26 - 00;06;09;09
Speaker 1
Just tell you a story real quick here about my experience with this. And as I told you in the last episode, I wasn't always known as the barbecue pit engineer. You know, I was, I learned it over more than a decade before I started smoker builder. You know, like I said, doing the refrigeration industry, we had to move air for a living.

00;06;09;09 - 00;06;33;08
Speaker 1
And when I say refrigeration industry, it's more than just refrigeration. We were working on industrial, air balancing equipment, like in big factories. One unit I worked on was an 8 million BTU, direct fired unit I the flames were in the airflow, and that heated the building. And we had to keep that building pressurized with fresh combustion air to get to push the CO2 out of the building.

00;06;33;08 - 00;06;59;11
Speaker 1
And so air balance was a massive issue in this place. So dealing with those kind of scenarios, I learned quickly what air wants to do in a pressurized situation. But I really didn't learn it from like inches water column scenario, like what we're dealing with here. And the one moment I had a no duh moment hanging out with my buddy Cosmo one time.

00;06;59;14 - 00;07;28;02
Speaker 1
And, you know, there's a whole lot of conversations going around about these vertical baffle plates. Well, Jambo started doing this years and years ago, and I know there was other people before him as well, that no one ever heard of. But Jambo had, a scoop that pushed up and, you know, it was pretty revolutionary. I remember, man, early in the days of pit design, we were trying to defuze the atom bomb and figure out how that worked.

00;07;28;04 - 00;07;56;01
Speaker 1
Well, I was sitting having a beer with Cosmo at a conference we were at, and he broke out a napkin and started sketching around on a pit, two different pits that he had built by JP Custom Smoke. Anybody that's been listening to barbecue stuff or been in competition barbecue long enough, remembers JP custom smoke and he didn't build a lot of pits, and he may still be building pits, I don't know, but he built a couple of pits for Cosmo, and he said he didn't like them.

00;07;56;03 - 00;08;20;29
Speaker 1
But he built them anyway, and Cosmo is the one that introduced me to a flat vertical baffle plate, is what that is. Cheers, buddy, I appreciate that. But anyway, so what happened is, is he explained it to me in a way that it made sense for the first time how air travels through a smoker. And ever since then, I've just leaned into this one concept.

00;08;21;01 - 00;08;49;16
Speaker 1
And, so anyway, we're going to kind of get into some of that today. When he showed me that little napkin sketch, which we'll get into it here in just a little bit. It completely threw the corkscrew theory and the push the air down theory out of my mind forever. I was my life was changed. So anyway. And you'll see that in a lot of our smoker plans on smoker Planet, where we've designed plans, pits that we've designed and built and engineered for other people.

00;08;49;18 - 00;09;12;10
Speaker 1
Even a lot of pits that I've built myself. So anyway, if you want to see more about that kind of theory, go over to the Smoke Slinger YouTube channel. Smoke Slinger Pits, and you can see the Liberty 94. And that's the most recent version of that, design that I have going right now. So anyway, you know, we're going to kind of, get into some of this here.

00;09;12;10 - 00;09;44;16
Speaker 1
The thing that I've learned from watching these pits run, and it's been years and years and years that I've been running pits this way. I've noticed that we we wind up with the very top of that cook chamber, super, super hot and that's that right there was the practical application of that. Real quick here, we're going to call out a couple of myths that we just want to reinforce a little bit that these these are not necessarily true.

00;09;44;22 - 00;10;12;22
Speaker 1
Okay. So we're going to establish a fact that the air does not swirl in your cooked chamber like a corkscrew. The other thing we want to reinforce is that while you can cook great barbecue in a pit where the air is forced down, it's not necessarily the best situation in all cases. Have an open mind to that. The air doesn't necessarily want to run by being pushed down.

00;10;12;25 - 00;10;49;11
Speaker 1
It'll actually just go straight up as soon as it comes out from underneath of whatever's pushing it down. Just so you know, both of those, both of those two things are false. So, in the in an effort to prevent a lot of frustration and confusion, we're going to talk about draw. Now, we've heard that term as almost like a vacuum cleaner sucking out the smokestack that, you know, if it was pulling on that smokestack, we're basically sucking that smoke through the pit and getting it out, and we're keeping clean smoke.

00;10;49;13 - 00;11;21;22
Speaker 1
But that's actually not what draw is. So here we go. We're going to dive into the technical part of this. We're going to start with a statement. And the statement is is that draw equals volume and velocity there. They're the actual act of moving air through your pit is affected by the volume of air that we're moving. And you can, like I said in the last episode, air has density and mass.

00;11;21;24 - 00;11;39;02
Speaker 1
And if since when? Remember what we did last episode, we blew on our hand. So just like if you if you're new to this and you haven't heard the last episode, take your hand out, put it in front of your mouth and blow on it and you'll see, like even with fans that we are able to pump or move air around.

00;11;39;04 - 00;12;10;22
Speaker 1
And in that situation, the amount of air is usually called CFM. Cubic feet per minute. Cubic feet per minute is cubic feet, which is a volume measurement. And how many cubic feet it moves, per minute, which is velocity, how fast it's going. So how air actually moves inside of a smoker is very, very similar to the way a septic system works in your house, like the drains, or gutters in the street.

00;12;10;24 - 00;12;36;06
Speaker 1
But I like for the sake of visualization to liken it on to a piece of pipe, like a four inch, PVC pipe in your basement. Whenever you run the sink, water goes down straight, vertically down. It's heavy. And then whenever it gets down to where it has to go horizontal, it hugs the bottom of the pipe. Well, we're going to talk about density here for a moment.

00;12;36;09 - 00;12;59;12
Speaker 1
Gravity pulls on things that are dense. And that's what causes weight and density and mass measurements to to be real and so water is heavier than air. So water is always going to hug the bottom of the pipe. Now hot air as we heat the air it's going to hug up on the inside of a cook chamber, for instance.

00;12;59;15 - 00;13;19;17
Speaker 1
And so what will happen is water going horizontally down through that pipe swirls and hugs the walls, and it kind of sloshes around. And when it runs into like an elbow or, a t at the end of it, like where it's got a vent, it'll go straight into that T and fall down, but the air will go up.

00;13;19;19 - 00;13;46;27
Speaker 1
That's what air does inside of your pit. Whenever it's running, it just goes the other way. It goes up and whenever it runs into, say, the collector box or the collector box wall, it's going to hit that and it's going to have to be pushed down. So that's that's how air moves through a smoker. It's not equal. And hugging all 360 degrees of that wall ever.

00;13;46;29 - 00;14;08;05
Speaker 1
What you will notice is, if you remember, I talked about the brisket. When you tilt the brisket up and you look at the bottom of it, why didn't if it flows like a corkscrew, why didn't the bottom of the brisket get color? Or why isn't the color the same color as the top of our brisket was, because the air didn't flow down there, that's why.

00;14;08;08 - 00;14;40;02
Speaker 1
And so therefore, we're proving the fact that air hugs the top of that cook chamber. One other way you can tell is by holding your hand on the top of the cook chamber and the bottom dead center of the cook chamber in a horizontal application, and you'll feel the bottom is much, much cooler than the top. That also goes to prove the theory that air does not swirl like a corkscrew through a chamber, or air is also not pushed down for the full length of the cook chamber either.

00;14;40;04 - 00;15;27;12
Speaker 1
It actually goes to the top, because that's where our radiant heat is going. Out the walls of the pit right? So another thing to keep in mind is that in order for air to swirl like a corkscrew through a smoker, it would have to be pressurized. Now I'm going to bring up some fluid dynamics, practical real world application of fluid dynamics here is that since, so air is at what we call atmospheric pressure, that would be, I think 14.7 psi gauge or psi absolute is the actual zero reading on your gauges when you're reading an air pressure reading.

00;15;27;14 - 00;15;57;22
Speaker 1
And so when you take one p.s.i, I'm gonna try say it real slow. One P.s.i like, think about it like inches and, or centimeters and millimeters. Right. We have to break it down a little bit. Right. So one centimeter can be broken down into ten millimeters. Air is measured the same way when it comes to pressure. One p.s.i is 28 inches water column is what that is.

00;15;57;25 - 00;16;25;13
Speaker 1
It's just a way to measure pressures less than, one p.s.i. And so whenever we get down to zero absolute, now, we're going to start breaking it down to a vacuum. And that vacuum is, measured in inches micron. Right. So now what? We're the reason we bring these measurements up is to illustrate that your smoker is absolutely not running one psi or higher.

00;16;25;15 - 00;16;57;28
Speaker 1
Since it's not pressurized above zero necessarily in any one given place. Also, since your PID is not running the same pressure from the inlet to the exit of the stack, as a matter of fact, the pressures change all throughout that chamber, especially with wind conditions. So therefore the pressure is not heavy enough to completely fill the cooker with a pressurized column or volume of air.

00;16;58;00 - 00;17;29;19
Speaker 1
Stop and let you breathe for a minute. Because I just went we used to call that going BTU on you. So listen to it multiple times if you need to hear it. But what we're trying to establish is that your, your smoker is not pressurized. And therefore, since it's not, then that air cannot swirl because the mass, or the density of that air, in order for it to be swirling, it would have to be 100% the same pressure throughout the entire cook chamber.

00;17;29;21 - 00;17;53;20
Speaker 1
And then friction against the walls of that smoker is what causes it to spin, because the outside of that air mass, just like going down vertically down a drain, the water swirls. It would have to be hugging the walls of that, that cooker 360 degrees all the way around to swirl in unison and get the corkscrew effect.

00;17;53;22 - 00;18;07;18
Speaker 1
In piping design, that's called friction loss is what that's called. It literally causes the air mass to slow down the farther it goes along the pipe.

00;18;07;20 - 00;18;33;06
Speaker 1
All right. So we went way down the rabbit hole on air, understanding the volume part. Now we're going to talk about velocity real quick. So imagine putting your thumb over the end of a water hose. And when you put your thumb over the end of that water hose what happens is the water comes out faster. The water that's leaving the hose is really fast.

00;18;33;08 - 00;19;06;18
Speaker 1
That's how you can visually see a change in velocity. And that's usually caused because of a buildup of pressure on the backside of your thumb. So water in your house is typically around 60 psi, sometimes way higher, sometimes way lower. But that's a good average. And when you put your thumb over that, you have 60 psi pushing behind your thumb, a solid column of water, and then that water leaving is coming out in a, in a really fast spray.

00;19;06;20 - 00;19;39;09
Speaker 1
And so that's a way to visualize volume versus velocity. So what we have in a in a smoker, any time we use a damper on the smokestack. And this is a great place to visualize this is we know that air isn't going as fast into the inlet of your smoker. As a matter of fact, you might see the flames bending just a little bit if you if you have like a long pit that requires a lot of air and a smaller air inlet, that's that velocity coming in.

00;19;39;09 - 00;20;03;17
Speaker 1
And then look at your smokestack. If you damper that down, the air appears to go really fast out the outlet of that smokestack. But we know what a moving that fast inside the pit. We have a lot of volume inside that pit, and the pit is trying to pull new air in, and the lift in that smokestack is letting the smoke rise, which is pulling on the rest of the pit.

00;20;03;19 - 00;20;17;22
Speaker 1
And then we choke it down with that damper, and you can see what volume we're letting out is coming out very fast. And that's how you can visualize that same scenario in your smoker.

00;20;17;25 - 00;20;39;19
Speaker 1
So as hot air rises, it's going to pull in. In order for that air to go out, it's going to suck in new air. And that new air is cold and dense and goes into your coal bed like we talked about in the last episode. There. So we've already talked about how how air hugs the top of the pit.

00;20;39;22 - 00;21;05;20
Speaker 1
And then when it goes across over to the smokestack end, it wants to fall down. Now, those little collisions, they they cause little things like eddies in a river or in a gutter on the street. They cause the air to swirl. And we call that turbulence is what we call that in a in an Airstream like this. So turbulence can be a good thing in some scenarios, but it can be a really bad thing.

00;21;05;20 - 00;21;32;23
Speaker 1
And others. One place you might see, turbulence be a bad thing is whenever you're using a baffle plate that pushes the air down, if it's aimed down too much, that air wants to push down. And when it's it's actually being it's got suction on one side from the smokestack and it's got new air coming in that's cold and dense from the other side, coming into the fire being heated.

00;21;32;25 - 00;21;57;19
Speaker 1
And then that air is super hot. So it's literally pushing to get out is what it's doing. And that will actually cause that, that turbulence in front of that firebox throat will actually cause air to spin, which can also be a restriction. So I always had a saying, I would tell my guys that worked for me at the, at the refrigeration company is air pushes air.

00;21;57;21 - 00;22;20;01
Speaker 1
So cold air and hot air push against each other. And the best way to see that is with the weather. So whenever tornadoes happen you got a void, a vertical that's happening that's sucking that air up as fast as it can go. Warm air, cold air mixing at the wrong moment under the a low pressure. And that air spins, right.

00;22;20;01 - 00;22;44;11
Speaker 1
You've got this warm air mass and this cold air mass spinning vertically. Head overhead. Playing leapfrog almost. That's, that's what happens inside your pit. So the cold air coming in is falling down, and then whatever air is below it is pushing the other direction. And then the new hot air coming in is coming in fast and violent.

00;22;44;13 - 00;23;16;24
Speaker 1
And as it cools down, it starts to gain density and start falling. And it's starting to push down on the cooler air mass that's under the grate. We can use all of this to our, to our, advantage in, in certain designs, like the vertical baffle plate, that's where all of this starts to come together is, we know we don't want air to spin like a corkscrew, because the only way you could do that is to have, like, a fan literally pushing air into your cook chamber at that point, it's just not even practical.

00;23;16;24 - 00;23;38;09
Speaker 1
Honestly, it's very wasteful to do that. The fire can only burn so much oxygen and maintain the temperature that you're looking to maintain. So we just want nature to take over and do what it wants to do. We just want to encourage the air to do, exactly what it wants to do and not try to fake it out.

00;23;38;12 - 00;24;01;25
Speaker 1
So let's talk about a couple of different kinds of pits. In this scenario. We're going to talk about offset versus reverse flow because I know some of you guys have heard me say pushing the air down with a baffle plate of some kind. Now with reverse flows, it's a great way to even out the temperature throughout a cook chamber, reverse flows or like with tuning plates or something like that.

00;24;01;28 - 00;24;26;06
Speaker 1
We're doing that by keeping that hot air mass on the bottom and then letting the radiant heat radiate upward out of the baffle plate or the tuning plates, and then once that air gets to the other end of the pit, it wants to go up. It's still hot and it's wanting to go up and go out. So what we do then is let the convective air come back across the meat from above.

00;24;26;08 - 00;25;04;11
Speaker 1
That's a great way to do it, but it does it. You wind up with, a lot cleaner, air is what you basically wind up with. For instance, what will happen whenever you're, burning any kind of wood or, like, even gas furnaces, stuff like that. What we do is we try to slow that air mass down as it goes through whatever we're trying to heat, so we can suck as much BTUs out of it as possible and, get it to, just more efficient, get more heat energy out of it and keep it inside whatever we're heating in the smoker, we're trying to heat the bottom of the meat.

00;25;04;14 - 00;25;25;13
Speaker 1
That was the concern is, is how does the bottom of my meat get cooked if all the hot air is at the top? So what we did is we put a baffle plate in there. And when you do that, you slow the air mass down just enough to where you'll get. If you watch the smoke on a reverse flow, in ideal conditions, it's going to be clear you won't have thin blue smoke, you'll have clear.

00;25;25;16 - 00;25;51;11
Speaker 1
And what will happen is, is because it's slowing the air down enough that the fire is actually burning a lot hotter in that firebox. Your coal beds burning hotter, and you wind up burning all of the particulate that causes the blue smoke. Right? So reverse flows are a good idea, but you wind up sacrificing a ton of flavor when you, when you try to force that condition.

00;25;51;13 - 00;26;31;16
Speaker 1
So tuning plates, on the other hand, you can almost cause air to stay down underneath of whatever you're cooking with the tuning plates for a little while. And you know, your original way that this was happening was a guy named David Carlos as my first introduction to tuning plates. I saw his pits being built in Texas, and he would have these plates in there that were like rectangle, solid shaped plates that sat on a rail, and you would open and close those plates with smaller gaps at the beginning of the pit and bigger gaps towards the end followed after that with a tuning plate made by, like Horizon Yoder, the old, old, old Oklahoma Joe's,

00;26;31;18 - 00;26;54;02
Speaker 1
those kind of guys. They started out with a flat plate that had a bunch of holes in it, little bitty holes at one side and big holes at the other. And, matter of fact, we actually made a lot of those plates. We meaning my company, under the brand Lava Lock for a lot of years. And you can still get a lot of those plates for, backyard offsets like Oklahoma Joe's and Old country and stuff like that.

00;26;54;05 - 00;27;18;17
Speaker 1
And, you know, they work really great, but you still have the all that radiant heat trying to come straight up. And once it gets towards the other end of the baffle plate, it starts to spin back up. The conflict with those kind of plates is that the collector boxes right there, or the smokestack was at the top of the pit, and so you were trying to get that air to spin up, but it just like wanted to go straight up and and out the stack.

00;27;18;19 - 00;27;38;12
Speaker 1
It didn't get that air spinning backwards back over the top of the meat, which is where the reverse flows came in. So while both of these methods work and you can get great barbecue, they're just fighting nature. That's my opinion on those things. One more thing we got to talk about is like, what is the purpose of a damper in a smoker?

00;27;38;12 - 00;28;05;05
Speaker 1
Because after all, the dampers primary job is to correct airflow or correct temperature. So we correct temperature by correcting the airflow on the inlet side. We open and close that damper, or in most cases these days, you open and close the firebox door to get more or less air to your coal bed, which in turn drops or raises temp as you close it and open it.

00;28;05;08 - 00;28;28;15
Speaker 1
The other end of the pit is a smoke stack, and hopefully you have a damper on your smokestack. The reason that damper is there is to speed up or slow down the amount of air allowed to go in, or to come out of the smoker. So in other words, remember we put the thumb over the end of the water hose and that causes back pressure inside the pit.

00;28;28;16 - 00;28;46;10
Speaker 1
Now when we say back pressure, we're not talking a huge amount of p.s.i. We're just talking about just a little bit. And a lot of guys will say, close the damper down until you see smoke coming out your doors. When you see smoke coming out your doors, open it just a freckle and you know that you're at equilibrium inside the pit.

00;28;46;12 - 00;29;06;03
Speaker 1
It might have been me that said that first, I don't remember, but that's just kind of the thought behind the damper is that we don't want to, like, choke the fire out, but we want to make that perfect compromise to where we're building up a little bit of back pressure inside that cook chamber. So the air has to spin, and that's where all the magic comes from.

00;29;06;03 - 00;29;31;09
Speaker 1
And what we what I've heard Jeremy Yoder call, barbecue weather. So, perfect barbecue weather. So that's what we're chasing here with all of these designs and things like that. This episode's going a little bit longer, but I told you ahead of time we were going to go way down the rabbit hole. So anyway, let's get on into some actionable stuff while I try to find, into this.

00;29;31;11 - 00;29;53;08
Speaker 1
So some actionable things you can do right now. And we wore this one out earlier in the episode. You don't want to chase the the corkscrew myth. Like, we just have to change our visualization in our mind about how air moves in a smoker, right? We don't want to force air to do what it does not want to do.

00;29;53;11 - 00;30;13;08
Speaker 1
We want to lean into it like kung fu. Almost someone throws a punch at you, you grab that energy and you move it where where you want it to go. The same thing inside of our smoker. Let the air do what it wants to do. And it'll it'll actually completely change the amount of wrestling you got to do with your pit.

00;30;13;11 - 00;30;38;29
Speaker 1
So, realize that air moves and layers like laminar, flow is what that's called. We've got hot air on top. The cooler air always drops. It always is going to form an eddy any time it has to turn or change direction, the inside or the outside of that bend is always going to have an eddy of some kind there, and then that air is going to push air.

00;30;39;01 - 00;31;03;21
Speaker 1
It's going to force everything to go around it out farther or in farther. If you cook with this in mind, it's going to change your barbecue. Now, another thing you can do immediately is start using your damper intentionally. Like if you if you can remember what I said here about building that little tiny bit of back pressure, you know, it's totally okay if smoke comes out your doors.

00;31;03;23 - 00;31;29;06
Speaker 1
Pay attention to the color of the smoke, not where it's coming out. Not in my opinion. It is a complete waste of time to make smoke or doors seal completely. On an offset smoker. It's just not worth chasing. Use that to your advantage so that you can tell and get a visual reading of how your air is running in your pit.

00;31;29;08 - 00;31;55;22
Speaker 1
You know, use your stacked damper accordingly. We also want to make sure that we, are used, allowing the right amount of combustion air to our coal bed and using proper fire management, just like our last episode. If you didn't catch that, watch what your smoke is doing. If your smoke is is coming out very lazy, out of the stack, your dampers open too far or something else is going on.

00;31;55;22 - 00;32;21;29
Speaker 1
Your fire is lazy. You need to get a bigger coalbed, something like that. If you're if you're smoke is coming out super fast and dirty, then you know that you've got your smokestack damper closed a little bit too far. Or you also need to pay attention to your coalbed. The most important thing to remember about damper adjustments and coalbed adjustments is pay attention to the color on your food.

00;32;22;02 - 00;32;50;26
Speaker 1
Like the particulate and the things that are in the smoke will will cause your color on your food to be, darker or lighter red versus dark, super dark. The quality of that smoke and where that smoke is going in your pit indicates that as well as hot spots wind up caramelizing sugary bark and you wind up with a crunchy, hard bark instead of like, a firm, well set bark.

00;32;50;26 - 00;33;15;29
Speaker 1
That's that tastes good, so to speak. So those are indicators of poor or quality air patterns inside your pit. So tune your pit based on those indicators. And it probably goes without saying to make sure that your smokestack doesn't have a bird's nest in it. And if you've been cooking dirty for a really long time, make sure that the buildup from the soot hasn't closed off your smokestack.

00;33;15;29 - 00;33;36;12
Speaker 1
I actually seen one one time. It was a smaller stack on a pit, but there was only like half of its volume open for air because it had had such a dirty fire in it for so long that the walls were just growing inward. That's kind of messed up. So anyway, there you go, guys. I hope this episode helps you.

00;33;36;14 - 00;33;58;29
Speaker 1
My intention on this episode is to go nerdy on you, and I hope you found value in my nerdy talk here. If you have let me know in a review, I would sure appreciate it. I really, really enjoy talking about this subject matter, and I hope even more that it's benefiting you. Leave me a review. That's how I know.

00;33;59;01 - 00;34;22;14
Speaker 1
If you don't mind, don't just leave stars. Say something in the comments field there, please, because that's how I know what you think. And, if you haven't already, share the podcast with somebody else. Another barbecue nerd, and invite them along to our little inner circle here. And if you haven't already, use the barbecue hashtag barbecue nerds. That's going to help me find you on the internet.

00;34;22;14 - 00;34;27;18
Speaker 1
Whenever you're doing something nerdy, maybe I can call you out to see you next time.