Summer Smoke Days
Summer is peak season — the calendar is open, the social demand is at its highest, and the weather is the most challenging of the year. Humidity, not heat, decides most summer cooks.
The summer cook is a humidity story
Most cooks think summer is about heat — but the heat is rarely the variable that decides a cook. The cook-deciding variable is wet-bulb temperature: the lowest temperature evaporation can cool a wet surface down to. When the wet-bulb climbs into the high 70s and 80s, evaporative cooling from the brisket surface effectively stalls, and so does the meat. A Saturday with 95 °F air and 50 °F dew point smokes easily; a Saturday with 85 °F air and 75 °F dew point is harder.
Pop-up afternoon storms are the second summer variable. Most are convective and fire between mid-afternoon and dinnertime. A cook that finishes before the storm window or runs under a covered patio handles them fine; an open offset in a thunderstorm does not. The forecast's gust band and rain probability are the right places to look.
Live forecast
Want a zip-coded read on whether this weekend works in your specific city? The Best Smoke Days forecast scores the next seven days with explicit wet-bulb weighting for long-cook cuts, so the score reflects the actual difficulty of the day rather than just the headline temperature.
Other seasons
- Winter Smoke Days — fuel-rate inflation, short days, insulated cookers
- Spring Smoke Days — shoulder season, frontal storms, wind risk
- Fall Smoke Days — the strongest cook window in most regions