Pork Butt - The long smoke

There is something exciting and adventerous about setting out to smoke a 9 pound pork butt (or 8 of them). You know you are in for the long haul. The smoke will take about 16 hours, and if you want any chance of eating the pork butt the next day, you need to start the night before and smoke through the night. A typical smoke will have you starting the grill at about 9PM and putting the meat on the grill by 10PM.With a long-night smoke in your sights, you need to get prepared a bit early. We setup the canopy, the work table, and position the smoker, chimney, and charcoal before the sun goes down. You will be working in the dark when starting the charcoal, so it is useful to have a head-mounted flash light to guide you through the darkness.Around 9PM, you light up the first chimney of coals. Since this is a long smoke, you will want to use the "Minion Method" to manage your charcoal (mostly filling your smoker with unburned charcoal, then topping it with the hot chimney of coals). This will allow you to make it through the night without needing to refuel.

At 10PM, the pork butt(s) go on. You will spend the next hour or 2 monitoring the temperature and making sure you have a good, stable temp. Once you do, you can finally catch some shut-eye, that is, if you can stop thinking about your pork butts outside, and all alone.

At around 4AM, the alarm goes off, and you are quickly up and out the door to check the temperature. My smoker was hovering around 220, so nothing to do but maybe slight open the vents a bit and go back to bed. Then, back up at 7AM to check again.

Throughout the morning you will continue to monitor the temperature and make vent adjustments. You might stir the coals a bit to wake them up (what's left of them). It's time to add some coals. It's a good idea to fire up another chimney of hot coals and add them to your fuel. This will give you a nice burst of needed energy for the morning. In fact, you will need to add coal once or twice more between now and 3PM! Like I said, this is "the long smoke".

At around Noon, you start monitoring the temperature of your pork, ideally with a remote thermometer so you don't have to open the grill too often. You would looking for something over 190 degrees in the pork. On this particular smoke, 190 degrees came at 3PM.

Cooking a big pork butt is quite an experience. It really is more like an adventure!

You know what they say, success is a journey, not a destination.