Qinator

Big meats are off, little meats are on. Needles up!

I know that some folks have been able to turn in a Prime brisket and do well. I am not one of those people. The past 2 contests we switched to Primes to see if we could save money and still score. That experiment is over. As a team, we geek out on Excel spreadsheets after every contest to analyze scores and see what works. This is why this weekend at Calhoun I went back to a pork recipe that I was using in 2020. Taking a look at all of our brisket scores for 2016 till now, I discovered that on average, Primes cost us over 10 points in scores 160.2644 vs 170.7268. They also cost us a difference of average place of 12th vs 28th. I understand that neither placement or scores are a perfect measure because of variations in scoring and number of teams, but taken together, it is worth looking at. There are some other issues to contend with such as mistakes I made and matters of time and temperature. But all in all, I think that moving away from A9s was the single most important factor. - Alan