Lump charcoal event in Memphis reset how I stack my firebox

I was at a backyard cookoff last September over in Memphis, right by the Wolf River bottom, and the guy next to me was running a beat-up offset that looked like it survived a tornado. He let me peek at his firebox mid-cook and his coal bed was this even, low pyramid of big lump pieces, no tiny crumbs smoking up the place. My setup was dumping in a bag of whatever briquettes I grabbed at the gas station, and I kept getting these bitter white puffs that ruined two racks of ribs. He told me straight up, 'Your fire is choking because you're stacking like a lumberjack, not a fireplace.' So I switched to sorting my lump by size, putting the fistsized chunks on the bottom and the little bits on top, and my temps stopped swinging 50 degrees. That one afternoon taught me more than a dozen YouTube videos, and now I won't buy a lump brand that's mostly dust. Has anyone else had a stranger at a comp totally rewire their coal game?

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