I don't know if I mentioned this earlier or not (I think I did), but when doing a Minion type burn, you are running a smoldering fire basically, where maybe some coals are burning good with plenty of air, but some are just starting to light up and thus are not hot enough yet to burn clean. So how do you keep from getting too much bad smoke? By reducing the amount of smoke you create. In units that do a Minion type slow burn, almost all people use more charcoal than wood for this very reason. This way you are burning charcoal primarily, which is not going to smoke heavily because charcoal is wood preburned down to coals. Then use just a few small chunks of wood to get some wood smoke but in a much lighter dose. While these ligt up, they will produce a white smoke, but a thin white smoke so long as you don't use too much wood. Some people also notice that using certain kinds of briquettes may produce a thicker white smoke when doing a Minion burn as opposed to other briquettes, or even lump. So the quality of your charcoal could also be a factor in the amount of smoke produced.
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