First Smoke On The 14.5" Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker Smoker - Chicken Drumsticks

I decided to smoke 20 chicken drumsticks and 4 chicken thighs on the 14.5" smoker! It is PACKED! This was the first run on this smoker with food (although I did run one batch of charcoal through the smoker without any food on it a couple of days ago), so I thought I'd do chicken since it requires a higher temp to cook.  New smokers tend to run hot until a "coating" of grease and smoke get on the inside of the walls of the smoker.  I filled the entire charcoal rack and did not put water in the pan (although I did wrap the pan with aluminum and put the pan in the smoker). I put two chunks of Apple wood for the smoke.

The outside temperature was 31 degrees. The initial pit temp was at 294 degrees. I loosely wrapped the smoker with a 4'x6' welder's blanket that I purchased on Amazon.com.

Throughout the cook, the smoker stayed around 282-284 degrees.  I smoked the chicken until it hit 166 degrees.  Total cook time was 2.5 hours.  While I used a full charcoal ring of fuel, I was surprised how much un-burned charcoal was actually left over after the cook!  I'll be re-using this for another future cook.

The chicken came out tasting really smoky and the skin was less "rubbery" than in the past.  I think had the smoker been able to hit 350 degrees (or in that area), the skin would have been more crisp than rubbery.  Maybe I'll use lump charcoal for chicken in the future.  Still, it was better than my past chicken attempts.  Had the smoker not been loaded down so much and had there been a warmer temperature outdoors, perhaps it could have been higher even with the standard Kingsford charcoal.

I do believe however, that the welding blanket helped keep the temperature higher.  Before I installed it on the smoker, temps were hanging around the 230 degree mark.  I'll be doing more cooks on the small 14.5" WSM in the future and through the winter, the blanket will be on!