Recipe for How to Smoke the Best Beef Brisket

The night before you start your smoke, prep the brisket. Trim the fat off the brisket. Use a marinade injector to inject beef broth throughout the meat. Rub the brisket with your favorite BBQ rub – any combination of salt, pepper, paprika, brown sugar, and garlic powder will do nicely. Set the brisket on a rack over a baking tray, in the fridge, overnight.

* If you wish to eat your smoked brisket at supper time, around 5 pm, you will want to have your smoker ready to go at about 4 am. * Set up your Apollo® Smoker by pouring a load of unlit, premium chunk charcoal – like Blackstone - into the bottom basket and placing a number of wood chunks throughout. Light half to three-quarters of a load of charcoal using a chimney starter. Pour the lit charcoal into the center of the unlit that is in the smoker. Add the middle stacker of the smoker and fill the water basin with hot to boiling water. Add the cooking grid and the lid. Allow the smoker to come up to a temperature of 225°F. Close the bottom air shutters on the smoker to about one-quarter of the way open to manage the temperature. If the grill doesn’t heat to the right temperature, open one of the shutters to halfway. Continue to adjust by adding more or less oxygen until the smoker temperature evens out and holds steady.

Insert a temperature probe into the flat but close the section where the meat begins to get thicker. Set the internal temperature alert to go off when your meat reaches 165°F. Place the brisket, fat side up, on the cooking grids and secure the lid. Smoke for about 6 hours, spritzing the brisket with apple cider vinegar every two hours or so.

When the brisket reaches an internal temperature of 165°F, remove it from the smoker and double wrap with foil. Continue cooking – no smoke required - with the smoker at 225°F until the brisket reaches an internal temperature of about 205°F – reset your meat thermometer to alert you at this time.

When the brisket reaches a temperature of 205°F remove it from the grill, wrap it – still in the foil - with a towel and place it into an awaiting cooler – no ice – to rest for 3 hours. You can shut down the smoker for now by closing all of the air vents.

Heat your smoker up to 275°F, you may need to relight the remaining charcoal, or add a whole new load at this point. Once the brisket has rested, remove it from the cooler and cut the flat off. Rewrap the flat and cut the point – the thick part – into chunks. In a baking pan, toss the chunks in your favorite BBQ rub and BBQ sauce. Smoke the chunks for an hour until they are sticky and caramelized.

When you are ready to serve, slice the flat of the brisket against the grain, brush with any juices, and don’t forget to serve with the burnt ends. You can serve on a bun, or just slice and eat as is.

Now that you know how to smoke the best beef brisket, while it won’t be an every weekend thing, I bet you will be making it more often. A few words of advice, however.

Remember to adjust cooking times accordingly as larger and smaller briskets will take more or less time respectively.

Use a multi-probe digital thermometer like our Napoleon Bluetooth BBQ Thermometer, to monitor both the internal temperature of the smoker as well as the meat.

After about 6 to 8 hours, the charcoal will have been spent, you can manually add larger chunks of unlit lump charcoal to any that are still burning, or light a small load – ¼ of the chimney full – to add to the remaining charcoal still in the smoker.

We want to hear about how your perfect beef brisket went. Share your stories and photos with our social pages like Grills Facebook and Instagram using the hashtags #SmokedBrisket and #NapoleonGrills. Don’t forget to share your photos too!

Happy Grilling!