Achemen, you might just have got lucky. 8 ounces of hickory on brisket is an awful lot. More smoke flavor than most folks could endure. Now if you really, really like a lot of smoke maybe that would be OK but I never use more than 3 ounces for a brisket and that gives plenty smoke flavor. It's easy to over smoke a brisket because of it's large surface area to volume ratio.