How long should you add smoke to a brisket
If you’re wondering how long you should be adding smoke to your brisket, you’re in the right place.
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You should always consider adding as much smoke to your meat as possible.
That means the average length of time is about the entirety of your cook.
For hot and fast cooks, you’re looking at a very short cook length to leave your brisket out in the smoke. It depends of course how much it weighs, and how hot you are exactly cooking at. The same applies for low and slow cooks as well.
Can you smoke a brisket too long
You can definitely smoke a brisket for too long, just like any other piece of meat.
Contrary to popular belief, BBQ like brisket and pork shoulder and other types of big pieces of meat, need to be smoked for extensive periods of time.
Despite that though, you should always try to be conscious about the internal temperature and ensure that it never reaches past 205°F.
That is basically the longest I would ever recommend smoking a brisket for.
Anything past that and it will certainly become very dry and crumbly.
What happens if you smoke brisket too long
What happens if you smoke a brisket too long is that the collagen and connective tissues within your brisket will begin to dry out and make the overall meat very crumbly and unflavorful.
Even if you happen to rest properly, which is also recommended step, the brisket will still not be edible because the damage will have already been done.
How long is too long to smoke brisket?
If you think there is a long enough time to be smoking brisket, then you’re right.
Just make sure that the BBQ does not go past 205°F because that will severely over cook a brisket and make it to where you can’t eat it at all.
Always take the necessary steps whenever you have a big piece of meat that takes quite a while to cook through.
You don’t wanna waste all your precious time and you want to make sure that the results are fantastic.
Final Thoughts
The length of time that you should be smoking a brisket is really dependent on two things.
The first thing that correlates with how long you should be smoking a brisket is the weight of the overall piece of BBQ. The second thing is, how hot you are cooking it at.
Those two things influence the cook through rate and determine how quickly it will rise to the internal temperature of 200°F.
It’s not really about the smoke and how much it can impact the meat, because I’ve done many briskets that have been unwrapped for a period of 12 more hours and they have all come out fantastic.
Therefore, the most important thing in any barbecue cook is how much it weighs first of all, and how hot you are cooking it at.
This article was written by Robert McCall, the founder of bbqdropout.com. Robert also owns and operates the BBQ dropout YouTube channel where he demonstrates his first-hand experience cooking all kinds of meats and strives to provide helpful, authoritative content for people looking how to barbecue.
He primarily hand writes the bulk of the content but occasionally will leverage AI assisted tools, such as chatGPT, to properly edit and format each blog post on this website. This ensures a pleasurable reading experience for visitors. Read more about our editorial policies here. If there are any improvements that can be made to this article, reach out to us directly at staff@bbqdropout.com