Fuel and Smoke

To start, you'll need to choose what to burn. Lump charcoal or briquettes? There are advantages and disadvantages to both. Lump charcoal is real wood and therefore has real wood smoke and taste, but it doesn't burn as long or as hot as briquettes. Briquettes are manufactured from wood but don't seem like real wood to purists, but do burn longer. What do competition winners use? Either one. Briquettes will give a good, steady amount of heat and adding wood chunks will give the necessary smoke for flavour. There are websites out there that compare the multitude of brands of briquettes and lump charcoal. A lot of my choice is based on availability. One thing that I've noticed is that big box stores like Lowes, Costco, or Home Depot have fantastic sales before the big American holidays such as Memorial Day or July the 4th, in which case I stock up.

Lump Charcoal

I like to use a combination of briquettes and lump charcoal, usually in a 3:1 ratio. In that way, I get the advantage of long burn times with the former and the flavour of real wood smoke with the latter. After a number of BBQs, I have found that Kingsford's Professional (once branded as Competition) briquettes are pretty good. They are ready in a very short time frame and burn for a long time in a smoker, perfect if you're doing a brisket for over 12 hours. I also noticed that the Professional briquettes leave very little ash after a smoking session. Regular Kingsford Blue are fine, but the premium briquettes are worth the small bump in price.

Cowboy Brand Hickory Chunks

As far as smoke is concerned, this becomes a matter of personal taste although there are certain 'rules' for matching the species of wood with the type of meat or regional style of the BBQ dish. The most popular choices usually boil down to either hickory or mesquite. I tend to use hickory for pork shoulder, either beef or pork ribs, chicken, and sausage. Mesquite is the choice wood for Texas style BBQ, which also tends to focus on beef, such as brisket or beef ribs. The flavour of mesquite is more pronounced than hickory, but I've found that a big brisket can handle it quite easily. I haven't experimented with fruit wood or oak, but that's due to the lack of availability of those woods where I get my supplies.