A whole week of perfect brisket, then the bottom fell out

Last month I had five straight cooks where every brisket came off the smoker with a perfect bark and the probe slid in like butter. I was feeling pretty good about myself, even wrote down my exact fire management routine in a notebook. Then Saturday hit, we had a surprise rainstorm in Nashville and my temp dropped 40 degrees in an hour. I fought it for 6 hours, pulled the meat anyway, and it came out dry and chewy. Anyone else have a run like that where you think you've cracked the code and then nature reminds you who's boss?

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1 Comment

kevin2181mo ago

Fighting that rainstorm and then pulling early anyway, that sounds like one of those rough lessons where you realize confidence is just a setup for the next surprise. It's funny how much that mirrors everything else, not just smoking meat. You get a good routine going at work or in the gym, think you finally got it all figured out, and then one thing changes and the whole system falls apart. The trick is figuring out which parts of your process are solid and which ones were just riding on good weather. You'll get it back, but now you know the code is a little more complicated than you wrote down.