“I’m worried I might run out fuel during my cook, and won’t be able to access the coal basket again without having to pull everything out.”

There’s no need for refueling a fire when it comes to drums.  You won’t need to continuously add fuel as you go.  As long as you set your fire up right in the beginning you’ll be able to easily go for 15+ hours on one load.  The charcoal basket can hold quite a bit of fuel for its size.  And, when using a higher quality lump for example, that just extends the amount of time it will be able to go.  We recommend using high quality lump for all your cooks.

Since drums aren’t designed to run exclusively on wood that burns out relatively quickly you for sure won’t need to have access to the fire basket.  Instead what you do is add some wood chunks to your lit coals in the beginning before the grates and meat go on.  Meats take on their smoke flavor in the beginning phase of their cooks.  With brisket for example, this happens in the first 3 or 4 hours.  Since cooking spaces are much smaller and more concentrated with drums it’s not necessary to get anymore smoke on the meat beyond those 4 hours, otherwise you stand the chance at over-smoking.  Once you get to the “wrap” phase adding more wood would then be a waste, as none of its smoke would be penetrating the meat at that point.  There’s nothing “offset” on a drum.  Therefore, you won’t have to sacrifice losing any heat trying to get it to move across a cook chamber like you would with an offset type smoker.  That’s the beauty of a drum.  Heat & smoke rises, and it’s mostly set and forget.

With that being said, the only real reason you would possibly need to refuel would be if you’re doing hotter and faster cooks like for grilling, where you would be running a hotter fire and burning through fuel faster.  That’s about it.  If that’s the case, then what you would do is simply remove the grate(s) and baffle between rounds and add more fuel/wood.  Then replace and continue (Note: high quality lump charcoal gives the best results all around in terms of heat and time duration).

In all our years of using drums for various different cooks we’ve never once had to refuel on any of them.  We’ve done many 2 round pork rib cooks back to back, as well as 2 and 3 round chicken cooks, also back to back on the same fuel we started out with.  The beauty behind drums is that they run so efficiently you won’t ever need to refuel on a long cook like brisket for example.  It would seem scary to a novice when it comes to doing a long cook like brisket using a drum, as some drum designs don’t offer access doors of any kind other than their lids.  All you need to be concerned with is making sure to set the fire up right in the beginning, and your lump fuel will carry you through.

Don’t worry about wasting fuel.  When it comes to lump you can always “carry over” the unused portion that didn’t get lit for your next cook.  You can’t do that with your chimney starter coals like we show you in our “how to light a fire in your drum smoker” video, but that’s okay.  That’s the reason why we only light off a small amount, because we know we won’t be able to use those again.