Its finally here..!! Oh man..!!

Well, today is just like Christmas day for me, up at 7:30 on my day off. I picked up my new ProBBQ Excel 20. On the way home I stopped by "The Butcher Shop" to see my friend Lawrence and see if he had something I could smoke for my first cook on the Excel. He handed me a nice 12 lb CAB brisket and said "no charge".. I got to say I got the best butcher there is and for any one up in this neck of the woods you got to stop by and check out the great selection he has in his store and talk BBQ for a while.



Home and ready to open it up...



I got to say it is really packaged well with foam corners to protect the unit during shipping.



There is even a ProBBQ hat in the box which is good as a guy cant have too many hats.. There is a recipe book as well and hey, who is this Roxy guy anyways..



The water pan is huge which is great as this will allow even less farting around with adding liquid during those long cooks.



The lid with a new style handle, lets hope that thermometer works..



Each section was packed so well with bubble wrap around most of the components.



Now thats a charcoal basket..!!!



The cooker came almost entirely assembled except for the legs which took about 10 minutes to attach.. All together and ready to fire it up..



I was amazed at how much the charcoal basket holds, that is a lot of fuel.



I used a mix of Great Charcoal lump and briquettes and with all three vents open the cooker was up to 300 degrees in about 30 minutes, with water in the pan.. This will be great for cooking chicken.



After an hour I closed off two of the vents and took the lid off for a couple minutes. The Excel came back up to 225 and hummed along there and I was pleased to see that the lid thermometer is bang on the money..

Brisket is on and now the waiting game.. More pix to follow.

Outstanding!

Do you want to seal it before your first smoke?

Because it is a painted cooker you really do not have to season it. If it was a cast iron cooker I would do that for sure.

I did run the unit at 300 degrees for an hour to burn off any residuals.

Very nice! Is that brisket done yet?

Can I sugest you go to the garden store and get yourself a watering can, it make it so much easier and faster to top up the pan. We used a section of copper pipe and hot water that was kept warm on the webber at the last comp.A little tricky but we got it in there lol.

Dr_KY wrote:Can I sugest you go to the garden store and get yourself a watering can, it make it so much easier and faster to top up the pan. We used a section of copper pipe and hot water that was kept warm on the webber at the last comp.A little tricky but we got it in there lol.

Thats a great idea indeed. Thanks for the tip.