[ggriffi]

Noah,

Thanks so much for your thoughts. We are just a little over 2 months away from our first comp so I read this with great interest. I agree with everything but would like to add one thing that I am doing for practice. The first practice I did with 2 briskets, 2 butts, 6 slabs of bb's, and 12 thighs just to see how everything fit on my grill. Everything fit fine and tasted even better! However my timing was off a bit, so this past weekend I did just chicken and ribs to work on how long these really needed. I am going to cook these again this weekend to just make sure. After that I will do butts and briskets twice, once to get an idea for the timing and second time time to verify. Then three weeks before comp I am going to do a full cook but I am going to start this at about 8 or 9 a.m. using the timing that I have figured out for everything from the earlier practice sessions. My reason for this is that this will be the first time I will be cooking all at once since the very first practice, so if I need a little longer time for things I will have a better idea. Then the weekend before I will do everything just like I plan for the comp, starting Fri. night.

This might be overkill and might not work for a lot folks but this is just my plan for now, always subject to change though.

g