2023 Brunswick Stew

Every year we make adjustments and manage to make minor improvements to the process.  After last year I made some adjustments to the pipe burner to improve the efficiency of the flame. This is one of the burners for on of our smaller pots.

 

 I added new holes between the existing holes (we copied one of the existing burners) and increased the size of some of the holes to make them graduated.  What I got was a very nice blue flame with no yellow.

It made a huge difference in getting the stew to temperature. It also made a hot spot in the middle of the burner that scorched the stew in that area.  This is due to the shape of the carolina cooker pot being more pointed on the bottom that a more traditional/antique pot with a flatter bottom.  I'll be welding some of the center holes shut and drilling new holes toward the outer edges of the burner.

 

The new jet burners worked great. We'll be building more.  The keggle was another success.  The convex bottom causes the boil to churn the pot and pretty much just shreds the chicken.

 

 The big change this year was to how we process the stock. Everyone on the team has a bad back or shoulder or something.  So we didn't want to crouch over to strain the stock into the 2 gallon buckets we use to chill/store it so we dumped it into my 15 gallon brew pot (Center).  This allowed the fat to rise to the top and we drained from the valve, resulting in a lower fat stock.

 

Pipe burner info

 Meats and Sausages is another good source of info.  They have a great explanation about why venturis are needed and how to make you own burners along with info on canning, brewing and food preservation in general.

Allied Kenco has a data sheet with suggested hole numbers and sizes for pipe burners. They also have a great tips section on smoking, jerky etc. 

Burners Inc. posts their specs here

And you can use the chart located here to figure our a BTU estimate.

On a side note, in my Physics class many, many years ago the teacher created a propane burner pipe that connected to a disposable gas cylinder on one end and had a rubber membrane with a 3 inch speaker glued in place.  Music caused the flames to dance and solid tones held sine waves just like on the O-scope....maybe I'll make one.

Selas has a very good tutorial with charts for calculating the size of your burner. If you really want to dig deeper they have a PDF version that's more technical.

Technically these are called atmospheric pipe burners. There's even a NIST technical paper on them.

 

Pipe Burner Adjustments

 The cross pipe burners used by the church we hand made quite some time ago.  The guys the made them went through a lot of trial and error changing flame holes, orifices and venturi sizing.  Luckily one of them owned a hardware store.

I copied one to use as a base line then made some adjustments for my regulator setup. Since I have to make some adjustments to get it hotter, I figured I'd go ahead and get a real venturi.

I ended up enlarging some of the air holes to get rid of the yellow in the flames.  Notice the yellow sealing tap. It's specific for gas.

If you search for propane venturis you'll find Tejas Smokers are the top of the list. These guys make customer burners and have parts. Their customer support is great but they are a bit pricey for budget.

If you change your search to "air mixer" you get links to restaurant supply sites (and here) and specialty grilling sites

I eventually found the same thing on Amazon and used points to buy it. This one says it's slip on, but has threads.  We'll see how it works.

Jet power

Continuing with our after stew maintenance. One of the propa e burner/pot,combos we borrow is a King Kooker jetburner. It's great for getting water to a boil really fast. My buddy JH has built a smaller version using one of my old burner stands. We'll use this one with my 13 gallon brew pot. I'm planning on 2. I'll make a brew pot out of a keg for the second one.  You can see it in action here -

 

Maintenance

Right after stew week is the best time to maintain our gear, otherwise it is forgotten until we start cooking. This is the pipe burner for my pot. Connected to tje regulator running one of the small pots it never gets hot enough. Running on a 10 psi regulator by itself it will blow out if turned too high. Again, not getting hot enough. So I'll fiddle with it until I get it right.