OK, I'm back with an update... Don't laugh... (Yet!)
I did a 'lump vs briquette' cook tonight to see what all of the fuss was about. It looks like a lot of trouble, but really wasn't more than firing up two chimneys of charcoal and dumping them in two different grills. So, here we go...
I was cooking chicken, with the thought that we would cook it 'indirect' to drag as much charcoal flavor into it as possible. I'm not sure that really happened. (More on that later)
The first thing I did was to 'foil' the charcoal grate of two SJs I have here. The foil funnels all of the incoming air directly into the coals and keeps a nice draft going.
After that I filled two chimneys with charcoal. Since I don't have two SJ-sized chimneys, I used the SJ chimney as a measuring cup to fill the larger chimney so that I ensured there was an equal amount of charcoal in each. Since the full-size chimney was too-big, I used a piece of sheet metal (not shown in this pic) to jam the charcoal up into the side of it to mimic the smaller chimney.
Time to make some fire!
In 20 minutes we had lit briquettes: (You can see the sheet metal used to jab the briquettes up in this pic)
And lump:
Here we are ready to do some cookin:
The victim was a whole chicken that was cut in half:
Next was to slap that yard-bird on the kettles and monitor the temps. I had set the bottom vents approx. half-open, and that seemed to hold the temp right around 350deg. I was pretty surprised that it didn't take a lot of monitoring or adjusting. They really held their temps pretty steady. I was amazed.
It was at this point I stepped back and noticed that our driveway looked like some sort of a mad-scientist was at work. LOL!
I spent the next hour watering some shrubs around the house. Every once in awhile I'd peek in through the top vent of each and see this. Ahhh... All is well!
About 1hr 15 min later they were done. Lets eat!
So at this point I was really wondering. "What's the difference?" Well, not much... I'd almost say nothing really. We really couldn't tell any difference between the two bird-halves. So, did this experiment prove anything? Not really. Part of me wonders if instead of indirect you'd taste more of a difference with a 'high and hot' BBQ rather than this low and indirect cook. Hey, another opportunity to grill some meat!!
Sorry... Nothing to report. But we did have some YUMMY chicken tonight!