Lump or real wood...
 

Just brought home a Peoria Cooker with the internal firebox along with the Cyberq from BBQ Guru. Planning on doing a brisket and a ham tomorrow afternoon and have a question for all my brothers of the Q.

What is better or what should i do. Should I just get a hot bed of coals and fill up my internal firebox with cherry and hickory wood chunks, or should I just fill it up with lump charcoal, or, a mixture of both?

Wow, I'm not sure where to start.

You definitely want your heat source to be hot coals. How you achieve that is flexible. You can start with seasoned wood, or start with charcoal. Either way, you need to establish a hot bed of coals, and add wood to it a little at a time, so you are not trying to get a lot of wood ignited and burning efficiently in a short amount of time.

If this is your first cook on this cooker, I'd say you might want to get your hot bed of coals going with some lump charcoal, and add small pieces of seasoned wood to that.

CD

Its gravity fed so not all the wood will burn at one time. Still playing a little bit with it

I hate to tell you this but you should learn your fire without a temp controller first. Learn fire and how to control it manually and the best ways to get good smoke. Using a controller is putting the cart in front of the horse. I have two controllers and don't use them unless i'm doing an all nighter (i need sleep) You'll turn out better Q and learn more this way....TRUST me.

Practice, start with a small hot fire which will give you the best smoke and experiment with how your temps go.

Well then, I have no useful advice for you, since I don't know chit about gravity fed smokers.

Good luck to you.

CD

Thanks for the replies. I was using a char griller with offset firebox for about a year now, using wood chunks and was keeping the temps up just fine doing that. I opted for the guru so I can do other things without tending to the smoker all the time. Nice to have good tasting Q and still be able to other things on my weekends.

Id use a mixture. But like someone else mentioned learn your smoker before taking on an expensive cook.. Start with chicken and or pork butt(forgiving). After you are familiar with it sell it and get a stickburner(just kidding).

I've never cooked on one but did review the excellent product video on their website, very neat cooker design. It does not look like you have an option recommended above of learning to cook without controllers to learn your pit first (normally excellent advice) because the design of the internal firebox unit is dependent on the controller technology.

To your question, I would try a mixture of lump and wood, up to 50/50. I would try to make sure my lump and wood chunks are about the same size.

This is a pretty unique cooker design for most of us. Please share a post of a cook or with pics so we can see how it works.

Best of luck!