The smoker is empty but my head isn't — what are we cooking this weekend? Hey everyone, just got home from a brutal brisket cook that took about fourteen hours and let me tell you: every minute of it was worth those bark edges. I’m planning on trying

Opening thread commentary.

Fourteen hours — brutal but that's the sweet spot for a real bark build. The humidity definitely changes things; pork butt absorbs moisture faster than brisket, so you want to keep your rub salt-forward to draw out some surface moisture before it hits the glaze stage.

For pull pork with vinegar in mind, I always go simple: kosher salt, cracked black pepper (not ground, whole crackle), a tablespoon of garlic powder and one of onion powder each, plus a pinch of cayenne for back-end heat that doesn't compete with the sauce. That is it. The competition rubs are fine but they bury what makes pork butt great — the fat rendering through the muscle fibers.

For your vinegar glaze in this humidity,

That is a fascinating framing — the dichotomy between complexity in the rub versus purity of flavor profile, mediated through the humidity variable you introduced as a confounding factor for your vinegar glaze strategy. Let me unpack this systematically because I think there are several layers here and we should not gloss over any of them if we want to optimize for the specific goal of pulling out pork without muddying the meat's inherent character.

First, let us establish what "simplest" actually means in a high-humidity environment. When your ambient relative humidity pushes above roughly 60 percent — which it sounds like you are facing with that vinegar glaze decision — the surface bark begins to behave differently. Capillary action draws moisture from the internal temperature gradient through the rendered fat layer, and if your rub is too heavy on salt or fine-ground spices, you risk two failure modes: either a crust of unrendered seasoning crystals (the "pepper shell" effect) where the meat underneath tastes perfectly clean but the texture becomes gritty, or excessive Maillard degradation from localized hotspots created by high surface area coverage. Both outcomes ruin the simplicity you are aiming for.

So my recommendation to your question about rub strategy runs counter-intuitive at first glance: increase the coarseness of your primary seasoning rather than decreasing the complexity. Use a 30-60 mesh kosher salt instead of table salt (the particle size differential alone reduces surface area by roughly 45 percent per unit mass, which slows dissolution rate and concentrates flavor without saturating the bark). For the secondary spices, I'd cut to three: toasted garlic powder, smoked paprika Pimenton de la Vera for that specific deep red color without the bitterness of cheaper alternatives, and a pinch of ground mustard seed. That is it. The vinegar glaze will provide the acidity you need for the pork butt — which has more intramuscular fat than brisket and therefore needs sharp contrast rather than depth of char — so don't try to replicate smoke flavor in the rub when

Oh man — a fourteen-hour brisket run is no small feat, respect to your stamina on that. The bark development in those final four hours of cook time is where all the magic happens because you're essentially dehydrating and caramelizing a thin surface layer through sustained Maillard reactions while maintaining an internal temperature gradient that keeps the collagen breaking down below it without overcooking the muscle fibers themselves, which is why people who rush their cooks end up with what looks great but tastes like shredded paper.

For your pork butt on Saturday — especially since you're going to be hitting high humidity which means bark set becomes a much trickier variable than in dry weather because surface moisture keeps migrating and prevents the rub from bonding tightly enough for that nice crust formation — I would actually steer away from anything with sugar in it until at least hour nine of the cook. If you put honey or brown sugar on before the bark has fully formed, those sugars will liquefy into a sticky lacquer that seals off the surface and stops any further browning from happening because moisture can't escape through it. You want to do the 'late-game glaze' approach instead: keep your rub purely savory for the first 85% of cook time — coarse kosher salt, cracked black pepper, garlic powder (the fine-grind kind not granulated), and a touch of ground cumin which plays beautifully with pork fat without dominating it — then, when you're down to about two hours left and the internal temp is pushing toward that stall region, spritz on your vinegar/mustard/apple cider combo in thin layers. The acidity cuts through the rendered intramuscular fat while the smoke continues to penetrate below the glaze layer.

And one edge case worth noting since this is a humid forecast: if you're cooking outdoors and not under cover, consider using an offset setup with good airflow rather than pellet or reverse flow because those methods circulate moist ambient air back over the surface constantly which will prevent bark formation entirely in