This post is for new members who just joined r/Smokingmeat. Welcome.

We get the same questions over and over, which is fine, that's what the sub is for. But if you're brand new and just bought a smoker (or you're about to), read this first. It'll save you a few ruined cooks andmoney.

Types of Smokers (and which one you should actually buy)

There's no "best" smoker. There's the one that matches how much you want to babysit a fire.

Pellet grills (most mentioned in the sub are Weber Searwood, Recteq, Traeger, Camp Chef, Pit Boss) - most beginner friendly ones to start. Set a temp, load pellets, walk away. It's basically an outdoor convection oven that burns wood pellets. Smoke flavor is lighter than other smokers, which some people hate and beginners usually don't notice. Needs electricity. $400 on the low end, $1,000+ for a good one. This is what most new people should buy. Thread to check out: https://www.reddit.com/r/Smokingmeat/comments/1q2ybdu/if_you_could_buy_any_pellet_grill_in_2026_what/

Charcoal bullet smokers (most mentioned in the sub are Weber Smokey Mountain, Pit Barrel) - these are cheap, dead reliable, incredible results. The WSM has been around forever and there's a reason people still run 20 year old ones. You'll learn actual fire management, which makes you better at everything else. Around $400. My honest pick if you want to learn the craft rather than just push a button. Thread to check out: https://www.reddit.com/r/Smokingmeat/comments/1ucucb7/how_good_are_those_simple_charcoal_vertical/

Vertical cabinet smokers (most mentioned in the sub are Camp Chef Smoke Vault, Pit Boss Copperhead, Masterbuilt, Dyna-Glo) is basically a tall box, heat at the bottom, four or five racks stacked above it. They come in propane, electric and pellet versions. The reason to buy one is capacity, you can fit way more food in the same patio footprint, and the tall chamber means smoke rolls over everything on the way out. Fantastic for ribs, sausage, jerky, and cooking for a crowd. Downsides are that you can't sear on them and most cap out around 350-400F, so poultry skin is a struggle. $200-700 depending on fuel type. Good discussion on vertical vs. horizontal: https://www.reddit.com/r/Smokingmeat/comments/1ux2x49/vertical_or_horizontal_smoker/

Kettle grill with an insert (Weber Kettle + Slow N Sear or a snake method) - most budget friendly, most actually start with Weber Kettle (no need to stick to Weber). If you already own a kettle, you already own a smoker. Add a charcoal basket or just arrange briquettes in a C shape and light one end. Total cost to start: whatever a bag of charcoal costs. Capacity is limited but it works. Proof: https://www.reddit.com/r/Smokingmeat/comments/1oas138/need_a_simple_smoker_recommendation/

Electric smokers (Masterbuilt, Bradley) - cheaper than pellet grills but worse temperature-wise. Pellet grills burn wood pellets to provide high-heat versatility for grilling, roasting, and smoking up to 500°F+. Electric smokers use an electric heating element and small wood chips strictly for low-and-slow smoking up to about 320°F. Plug in, set temp, add wood chips. Problem is they run cool, they struggle to make real bark, and the smoke flavor is faint. Fine for jerky, sausage, fish. Not great for brisket. I don't see the reason to buy it, unless you live in apartment: https://www.reddit.com/r/Smokingmeat/comments/1agqizg/electric_smoker_inside_my_apartment/

Propane/gas smokers - cheap, easy to control, no electricity needed. Same bark problem as electric, though slightly better. Decent for a first smoker if you're on a budget.

Offset stick burners is the real deal but also the hardest. You're feeding a fire every 45 minutes for 12 hours and learning to read smoke color. The $300 offsets at big box stores are thin metal garbage that leak heat and will make you miserable, so please don't start there. Good ones start around $1,500 and go way up.

Kamado (Big Green Egg, Kamado Joe) is the final boss both pricewise and skillwise. Ceramic, holds heat forever, sips charcoal, and doubles as a pizza oven and a searing grill. Smaller cooking surface than you'd think. Price range is over $1,000. Cool discussion on whether it worth its price or not: https://www.reddit.com/r/Smokingmeat/comments/1u1jrdp/are_komodo_joe_or_green_egg_overpriced_and_not/

Best for beginners

If you want easy: pellet grill, Weber Searwood or Recteq Flagship are two mostly mentioned among sub members. If you want to learn and don't mind tending a fire: Weber Smokey Mountain or a Pit Barrel. If you're broke: use the kettle in your garage right now.

Buy a Thermometer Before You Buy Anything Else

The dome thermometer on your smoker is lying to you. It's reading the temp at the lid, not at the grate where your food is. Good discussion on best meat thermometers for smokers: https://www.reddit.com/r/Smokingmeat/comments/1u7h70h/what_would_be_the_best_wireless_thermometer_for/

Get two things:

• A leave-in probe thermometer with at least two probes (one in the meat, one clipped at grate level). ThermoWorks Smoke, Fireboard, Inkbird, Meater if you want wireless.
• An instant read. Thermapen is the gold standard, but a $25 ThermoPop or Inkbird IHT-1P is fine.

This is the single biggest difference between people who post good cooks here and people who post questions asking what went wrong.

Wood: Keep It Simple

• Oak is the safest all purpose wood. Hard to overdo.
• Hickory is the classic bacon-y smoke flavor. Great with pork. Go a little easy, it turns bitter if you drown things in it.
• Apple and cherry are mild and sweet. Cherry also gives you that gorgeous mahogany color. Perfect for poultry and pork.
• Pecan sits between hickory and fruit wood. Very good, underrated.
• Mesquite is aggressive. Great for a hot fast steak, rough for a 12 hour cook. Beginners burn a lot of meat with mesquite.

Never use softwoods (pine, cedar for actual smoking, spruce), treated lumber, or anything painted. Cedar planks for salmon are a different thing and those are fine.

Also, the "soak your wood chips" advice is nonsense. Water doesn't penetrate wood in 30 minutes. You're just making steam before you make smoke.

Discussion on best smokings woods: https://www.reddit.com/r/Smokingmeat/comments/1vj0g69/top_5_smoking_woods/

What Good Smoke Looks Like

Thin blue smoke. Almost invisible, wisps that you see against a dark background.

Thick white or grey billowing smoke means incomplete combustion and it tastes like an ashtray. If you're choking your fire down by closing all the vents to hold temp, that's usually the cause. Control temp with airflow into a clean burning fire, not by smothering it.

Best First Cooks (in this order)

1. Chicken thighs. Cheap, forgiving, done in about 90 minutes. If you screw up, you're out six bucks. Run these hotter, 300-325F, because low and slow gives you rubbery chicken skin. Pull around 175-185F internal. Yes, higher than the 165F you've heard. Thighs are dark meat and they get better with more time.

2. Pork butt / pork shoulder. The most forgiving big cut there is. It's full of fat and collagen so it's very hard to dry out. 8-10 lbs, cook at 250F, expect roughly 1.5 hours per pound but time is a rough guess not a rule. Pull at 200-205F when a probe slides in like room temp butter.

3. Spare ribs or baby backs. Now you're learning feel instead of numbers. Ribs are done when they pass the bend test, pick them up with tongs a third of the way down and the surface cracks. Around 195-203F but the bend test matters more. Skip the 3-2-1 method, it usually overcooks them to mush.

4. Beef brisket. Last. Not first. It's expensive, it's a 12-16 hour commitment, and it punishes you for every mistake. Do the other three a couple times first.

Other easy wins: pork tenderloin, chuck roast (poor man's brisket, honestly excellent), whole chicken, meatloaf, salmon, wings, and a fatty (bacon weave stuffed sausage roll, look it up).

The Stall (this is where new people panic)

Around 150-170F internal, your meat will stop climbing. For hours. Sometimes five hours. It'll even drop a degree or two.

Nothing is broken. It's evaporative cooling, the meat is sweating and that sweat is cooling it as fast as the smoker is heating it. Once the surface dries out, the temp climbs again.

Your options:

• Wait it out. Best bark.
• Wrap it (the Texas crutch). Butcher paper keeps the bark decent and lets some steam out. Aluminum foil is faster but softens the bark and steams the outside. Wrap around 165-170F once you've got the color you want.

What you should not do is crank the heat and open the lid every 20 minutes to check.

Rest Your Meat. Actually Rest It.

This is the most commonly skipped step and it wrecks more cooks than bad rubs do.

Minimum 1 hour for a pork butt or brisket. Two to four is better. Wrap it, throw a towel around it, put it in a dry cooler. It'll stay hot for hours.

Slice a brisket straight off the smoker and all the juice runs out onto your cutting board. That juice was supposed to be in the meat.

Cut against the grain. On brisket, the flat and point run in different directions, so separate them first.

Common Beginner Mistakes

• Cooking to a clock instead of a temp
• Opening the lid constantly (if you're lookin', you ain't cookin')
• Too much smoke wood, thinking more smoke means more flavor
• Trusting the dome thermometer
• Starting with brisket
• No rest period
• Buying a cheap thin metal offset because it looks cool
• Sugary rub at high heat, it burns and turns bitter
• Skipping the trim on brisket and pork butt (leave about 1/4 inch of fat cap)
• Sauce too early, most sauces have sugar and will scorch. Add in the last 20-30 minutes.

Also, the fat cap up vs fat cap down argument has been going for 40 years and nobody has won. Don't lose sleep over it.

A Note on Rubs

Central Texas brisket is salt and coarse black pepper, 50/50. That's it. It's one of the best things you'll ever eat.

You do not need a 14 ingredient rub. Start with salt, pepper, garlic powder (SPG) and add from there once you know what your smoker tastes like. Mustard, oil, or hot sauce as a binder is fine, none of it affects flavor, it just helps the rub stick.

Salt the meat the night before if you can. Dry brining makes a real difference.

How to Get Good Answers in This Sub

When you post a question or a "what went wrong" post, include:

• What smoker you're running
• Cook temp and how you measured it
• What cut and what weight
• Internal temp when you pulled it
• Whether you wrapped, and with what
• How long you rested
• A photo of the cross section, not just the outside

"My brisket was dry" with no details gets you 40 different guesses. The details above get you an actual answer in about ten minutes.

And post your cooks. Even the ugly ones. Especially the ugly ones. Nobody here started good.

Questions go below. Somebody in this sub has made every mistake you're about to make.

Many recommended Coldcard in this sub as one of the safest options for self-custody, and I stand by hardware wallets in general. But something serious just happened and you need the full picture.

Starting July 30, 2026, attackers began draining Bitcoin from thousands of Coldcard wallets in waves. Over 1,700 BTC, worth around $116 million, was stolen from more than 4,500 wallets. The first wave alone hit in about 25 minutes.

Here's why it happened. Back in March 2021, one bad line of code in a firmware update caused Coldcard devices to generate your seed phrase using a weak, predictable random number process instead of the secure hardware one it was supposed to use. Your seed phrase is basically the master password to your wallet. It's supposed to be so random that no computer could ever guess it. Because of this bug, the "randomness" was way lower than it should have been, so attackers could run through possible combinations using powerful computers until they found wallets with funds, then sweep them clean. No phishing, no stolen device, no exchange hack. Just math.

Which models are affected? All of them to some degree. Mk2 and Mk3 are worst hit. But Mk4, Mk5, and Q wallets are also affected if the seed was generated before the patched firmware came out.

Most important thing to understand: updating your firmware does NOT fix the problem. The weakness is in the seed phrase itself, not the device. You need to generate a completely new seed on patched firmware and move your funds to the new wallet. Do not reuse your old seed phrase anywhere, even on a different wallet or device.

Steps to take right now:

1. Update firmware (Mk3 to v4.2.0 or later, Mk4/Mk5 to v5.6.0 or later, Q to v1.5.0Q or later)
2. Generate a brand new seed on the updated device
3. Transfer all your BTC to the new wallet addresses
4. Never touch the old seed phrase again

Also watch out for scams. Fake Coinkite sites and "vulnerability checker" tools are already circulating. Never enter your seed phrase into any website for any reason. Go directly to the official Coinkite site, typed manually.

This does not mean hardware wallets are unsafe. Trezor, Ledger, Dcent and others have confirmed they use different methods and are not affected by this specific bug. This was a Coldcard firmware issue, not a flaw in Bitcoin or cold storage as a concept.

I'll be doing a full updated video on this soon on my channel. Stay safe and move your funds if you're affected.

For those who've been to the Galapagos, what would you do differently if you went back? Trying to learn from other people's experiences so I can plan my trip better and avoid common regrets.

I'm constantly seeing posts here and on Facebook with all types of quirks, bugs, and breakdowns with the ID.Buzz. I've driven over 2000 miles so far and had no issues at all, but tomorrow I'm starting a big 4000+ mile road trip (from Canada through the US) and I'm a bit scared something might go wrong. Just curious how many of you have driven yours and whether you had any issues.

I feel like these posts can create a skewed picture because people mostly post when something goes wrong, not when everything is working fine. So I'm hoping to hear from the silent majority who've been driving trouble-free and just don't post about it.

For those who've put serious miles on your Buzz, how has reliability been? Have you done any long road trips without problems, or did issues pop up that I should watch out for? I'm especially nervous about being far from home in the middle of the US if something electrical or mechanical goes wrong and I can't find a VW service center nearby.

I'll be in Quito soon and I booked my accommodation in the old historic town area, but after reading this sub it seems like it's quite a sketchy area that's not recommended. Which hotel did you stay at in Quito and would you recommend it?

I chose the historic center because I wanted to be close to the colonial architecture, plazas, and main sights. But now I'm reading that the old town can be unsafe, especially at night, and that tourists get targeted there. So I'm second-guessing my booking and wondering if I should switch to a different neighborhood.

Traveling to Europe (from Canada) soon and I decided to land for 3 days in Iceland since it's summertime and I always wanted to check out the country. I usually rent a car and explore on my own and hate group tours, but the more I read this sub the more I think maybe make an exception for the Golden Circle? This way no headache with parking during the busy season and lots of knowledge from a guide, but limited stops at each point turns me down a bit. Curious for experienced travelers' opinions.

I'm torn because self-driving is my preferred way to travel. I like the freedom of stopping wherever I want, spending as long as I want at each spot, and not being herded around on someone else's schedule. But everyone here seems to say the Golden Circle gets absolutely packed in summer and parking is a nightmare, which makes the guided tour sound appealing.

My hesitation with the tour is exactly what you'd expect - being rushed at each stop, only getting 30-60 minutes at places I might want to linger, and dealing with a big group. That kind of kills the experience for me usually. At the same time, I have a limited stay in Iceland and it will help me to see more places.

For those who've done the Golden Circle both ways or have strong opinions, is it actually worth doing as a guided tour to avoid the parking and crowds hassle? Or is self-driving still better even in busy summer season if I go early or time it right?

Just curious what everyone uses? I recently switched to the Victorinox Fibrox 12 as per a recommendation in this sub, but curious what everyone else uses and how you like it since knives are sort of my hobby.

The Victorinox has been solid so far for me, great value, holds an edge decently, and the length makes single-stroke slicing on brisket way easier than the shorter knife I was using before. But now I'm curious if I'm missing out on something better since I'm getting more into knives as a hobby and wouldn't mind upgrading if there's something worth it.

I'm traveling on a budget in Italy and really want to visit the Colosseum (on Aug 15th), but I'm not sure if overpaying for skip-the-line is worth it unless it's really saving a lot of time. Did anyone take it? Does it worth it?

I've seen the regular tickets and then these skip-the-line or guided tour options that cost significantly more. As someone watching every euro, I'd rather put that extra money toward food or other experiences if the standard ticket gets me in without wasting half my day in a queue.

For those who've visited the Colosseum, how bad are the lines really with a regular timed-entry ticket?

I've been eyeing those glass dome hotels in the Sacred Valley where you can sleep under the starry skies, but despite how cool it looks, it seems like there could be many struggles like heat, privacy etc. My concerns are things like temperature control. Do these domes get unbearably hot during the day from the greenhouse effect, or freezing cold at night at that altitude? And what about privacy - are you basically exposed with everyone able to see in? How do they handle bathrooms and normal hotel amenities in a glass dome?

For those who've stayed in the glass domes or sky lodges in the Sacred Valley, what was the reality like?

Amazon Prime deals event us happening till June 26th. Feel free to share your findings, but here's what I found (links a referral and help to support mod team of r/smokingmeat):

Wood pellet grills and smokers

Masterbuilt Vertical BBQ Smoker (40% off)

Pit Boss 440(20% off)

Recteq pellet grill (16% off)

Traeger Woodridge (11% off)

Wireless Meat Thermometers

CHEF iQ Sense (41% off)

MEATER Plus (45% off)

Wood pellets

Kona (19% off)

Knives

Victorinox Fibrox (31% off)

imarku Brisket Knife (62% off)

I am currently using Cutluxe BBQ carving knife (current on Amazon deal too lol). It’s okay overall, but I’d like to invest in a truly high-quality, razor-sharp carving knife that will last me for the rest of my life and that I’ll be proud to use after every cook.

Ideally, I’m looking for something with Japanese craftsmanship and near-indestructible quality. I’m curious to hear your recommendations and what everyone else uses.

Hey all, Electrify stations are trashy and often have many broken chargers, so I use Tesla Superchargers with an adapter that work way better. The problem is they're designed for Teslas, so the cord is too short and I need to park in a way like a dork, taking up two spots. Last weekend I got into an argument with a Tesla guy because parking was full and I took the extra spot, so I get his point. Any workaround with this? As far as I know, cord extensions don't exist and aren't recommended.

I'm planning to visit Larco Museum in Lima and wondering if it gets crowded enough that I should buy skip-the-line tickets in advance, or if I can just show up without dealing with long lines.

I've heard Larco is one of the must-visit museums in Lima with its pre-Columbian art collection, but I'm not sure about the crowd situation. Is it the kind of place where you wait forever to get in, or is it usually manageable just buying tickets at the door?

I was recently at a conference and most agencies tried desperately to sell links. Most owners said they've lost 20-40% of revenue and it's getting worse since there's less demand from people. Are you buying fewer links today?

U.S.-based digital investing platform Robinhood has completed the acquisition of Canadian cryptocurrency firm WonderFi (owns Bitbuy and Coinsquare) effective June 1, thereby obtaining ownership of trading platforms Bitbuy and Coinsquare. The transaction establishes Robinhood's entry into the Canadian market, with the company indicating plans to introduce its application to users of the acquired platforms in the subsequent period. Canadian operations will initially be restricted to cryptocurrency trading, distinct from the broader equities and asset classes offered in other jurisdictions.

What are your expectations?