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I did my first corn beef this past weekend and was surprised by the cooktime. The high for the day was 14 or 15 and there was a lite snow falling all day. My reading on the brisket lead me to believe the cook time would be roughly 1.5 hours per pound.

As we all know, finding a large corn beef brisket is really hard. The one I had was around 4 lbs. I placed it in the smoker at noon. At midnight it was still struggling with an internal temp in the low 170s. The outside of the smoker was cold. The temp was set at 225.

At 2:30 I pulled it at about 180 internal temp. This was 14.5 hours. I was expecting a brick since it was such a small piece of meat. It turned out really nice, moist with no dry spots.

I did a search on insulating and it appears that the smoker should be good down to sub zero with no problems. I was wondering if anyone had created some sort of insulating blanket for the 4 sides, leaving the top/bottom open the the elements. Based on what I could find it appears this is not necessary.

Based on the cook time of the brisket, does this seem in line with what others have done? Or, was the outside a factor in the cook time. I've only smoked butts and salmon so this is my first shot at brisket. I will be doing another brisket this weekend. Just a flat brisket not a corn beef brisket. It is around 9 lbs if I recall correctly.

Dale
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The first thing I'd do is find out if insulation is even necessary by monitoring the oven temp. If the oven temp is normal insulation won't help. I suspect it's not actually needed.

The other thing I'd do is cook at 250 F, not 225 F. I know many cook brisket at 225 F, but I've done direct comparisons many times and I've never gotten better results from cooking them below 250 F.
Two things...

First, I have cooked in my 008 with outside temps as low as -10F and as high as 95F (Chicago weather... ) and I haven't noticed a significant change in cook times. One thing I do in cold weather is to put a metal colander over the top vent to help reduce the infamous gray spot.

Second, I have noticed that smaller cuts seem to tke much longer to cook. I also had a small corned flat take an incredible amount of time to cook. I'm not sure why, but others have commented on the same thing.
Thanks everyone for the inputs. It just seemed odd for the length of the cook time due to the size of the brisket. Also, there was little grease on the pan. It was all stuck/frozen to the bottom of the smoker. It fell off when I moved the smoker. I just picked it up and threw it away.

Mountainman, I'm at 6200 ft here in the Springs so our weather is relatively the same.

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