Minimax Brisket - Mixed results

First off, thanks to everyone who chimed in to my thread on about cooking a brisket on the MiniMax.  I'll separate this post into two parts for better explanation. 1. The minimax on a long cook and 2. the brisket.

1. I was quite impressed with how the little guy performed.  My setup was the MM, Platesetter with a Woo.  I loaded the fire bowl as best I could by placing loading from a brand new bag of BGE lump.  I only used BGE lump because I was out of my go to, and the only one I can get that's worth anything is from a local Lowes, but I don't trust it for a long cook.  Anyway, I fired up the grill at 11:00, and it was stabilizednicely at 230 by midnight, and I put the brisket on.  We went to bed (passed out) around 2:30, and it was purring along beautifully.  Woke up a few times before 8:00, and my Maverick was showing it was locked in at 235*.  It stayed they was for a total of 10 hours, before it started to slowly drop to 225.  WIth the brisket at about 160, I took it off, wrapped it, and reloaded the egg.  You can see from the attached picture that there was still probably a couple hours of lump left, but it was all around the edges.  I think if I just would have lifted the woo and pushed all the lump to the center, it would have carried on for a couple more hours. Since the Egg was hot, it only took about 20 minutes to lock back in, but I waited a total of 30 before putting the meat back on.  I noticed that the very end of the point was touching the dome, and at that spot it was nearly raw.  I made sure to pull it back when I put it back on.  It took a couple more hours to hit 190, and passed the probe test.  I then pulled it and let it rest in a cooler for a few hours.  As far as holding low and slow temps, I was really impressed.  But as I'll explain in part 2, it has its limitations.

2. The brisket itself was just meh!  Part of it may have been the size of the meat, and the egg, and part may be this was my first brisket.  I can't wait to make my next on one the LBGE with the R&B Adjustable Rig.  One problem was with an 8.3 lb brisket, even draped over a foil wrapped brick, there were parts of the flat that hung over the small platesetter, and after 12 hours of were as hard as the ceramic itself.  The rest of the flat was quite dry, and fell apart as I sliced it.  The point was pretty awesome, except I accidentally cut the first half with the grain, and well, that wasn't great.  I cubed that up and made burnt ends which were OUTSTANDING.

So in summary, the MM is a friggin workhorse, and I'm loving it more and more every day.  I don't know about cooking a large piece of for a long period of time though.  I think the small is a better low and slow cooker because the fire bowl is bigger, and the dome is also higher, which would allow you to drape something like a brisket higher to protect it from the fire.  The last picture is just a reminder of how pristine it was out on the frozen lake drinking beers, eating well, playing  and enjoying good company.