Help with timeline on big butt cook

I have 14 bone-in ibp butts that I am going to inject/rub and then smoke in my fec120 and was wondering about temp/time guidelines so I can time this right. Usually I do butts hot and fast at around 325, which involves wrapping about half way through the process, competition style. For this load I just want to load up the 14 butts, stick it in at 250 and in the morning have it ready without foiling, mopping, etc.

This is for a big tailgate party so I timing is important. I can have them finish a little early and stuff them in some cambros, but having them cook late would be a problem.

I can start cooking at any time on Saturday. I am out the door at 7am on Sunday. I figure I can hold them for up to 6 hours in the cambro when they finish before shredding them. I figure I have an ideal window of 4am-6am Sunday to work with, leaving me another hour to 7am if needed.

Any suggestion on when I need to load these in to get to that timeline?

my thought now is to put them in at 4pm at 250, hoping for them to be done at 3-4am. If they finish at 3am I may drop the fec120 down to 145 and keep them in there for 1-2 hours to hold before going into the cambros.

FYI, these butts are avg 9lbs a piece.

For those who come across this thread looking for exactly what I did, I took the 12 butts avg 9lbs out of the firidge for about an hour and then put into a cold fec120 smoker and set for 270 at 4:30pm. I pulled them out 12 hours later at 4:30am and put them right into the cambro turned on its back. I served the pork from 10:30am to 12pm and they were still steaming hot.

The only thing I may do differently next time is drop the temp from 270 to 260 as the butts were 5-10 degrees above what they ideally needed to be.

gtr said:

^^^another thing you could do differently is post pron! :hungry:

That's a big ole party - I'm guessing 150-200 folks?

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It was 305 people actually, and I will have some video in a few days. People loved when i was pulling hunks of butt out of the cambro and shredding them in a bucket with the roman pork puller. It was a real show.

We served the pork with those Hawaiian mini rolls from Sams and our homemade blue cheese slaw for people to make little slider sandwiches. This was in addition to 160 lbs of our brisket/short rib/chuck burgers, home made maple breakfast sausage, grilled keilbasa, award winning chili dogs, grilled taylor ham sandwiches, and teryaki chicken tenderloins. It was a ton of food!

early mornin' smokin' said:

how full was the 120? thinking about a pair of them for a bbq restaurant. What's the honest capacity and how even does it cook?

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They were pretty big IBP butts, with most of the fat cap still on. I put 2 on the top shelf, 3 on each of the next 3 shelves, and 1 on the bottom shelf. I thought it was pretty full. I know some people put 4 butts per shelf on all 5. I heard that you should not blanket load the bottom shelf though.

They were all done pretty evenly, I think the fan helps a lot with that. I have seen results from other people doing the biscuit test and the heat is pretty even. The unit was designed for small restaurants.

early mornin' smokin' said:

good to know! thanks for the review. We actually met at the battle of the BBQ brethren, i was wandering around early sunday morning.

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Ahh cool. Well, if you have any other questions feel free to pm me.