Lets do some bbq

I love to eat and I love to BBQ so naturally my hobby feeds my family and I so that is a good thing! Today I am going to put together a box to ship out to my Nephew and his wife in Seattle. Now since you all know I cannot post more than one picture at a time, this will be a ongoing thing today and when it is all done you can see the meat from bag to box so to speak.
I grew up in my fathers country butcher shop, slaughtering and cutting up beef mostly, occasionally doing hogs, but mostly beef.  But my father was a big fan of Carolina style BBQ, and it was not unusual for us to stop at a greasy spoon pit and eat BBQ couple times a day on vacation. In fact I sampled BBQ from Kansas to Carolina before I was 18 years old and grew to love it, but we never made BBQ always steaks and burgers. When I got older and moved to the ranch I decided to try my hand at traditional BBQ. I had spent some time in the pacific Island area of Guam and Hawaii during my military time and had seen the bury the pig kinda cooking, with banana leaves and hot rocks, but it just did not have that deep smokey flavor I loved so well. I found an old oil tank and turned it into a smoker pit like the ones I had seen during my travels, bought some hams and pork shoulder from the butcher and gave it a try using charcoal briquettes. The results were just okay and the sauce was good but something was missing from the mix. I tried wood the next time, oak wood and I have to tell you that was a lesson learned as wood burned so much faster and hotter than charcoal I had to have a hose ready and the smoke was so thick it had a very bitter taste, but the sauce was better this time. As I learned from my mistakes I built bigger and better smokers, found Hickory wood and cast iron pots for sauce making and entered into competitive BBQing. I had a team of guys who were into doing this and every year we would enter the local competitions. The first year we came in 9th out of 52 for our Boston butt. The next year we added a rib win to our trophy table, and the following year we had three top 10 finishes. Now competitive BBQ is very expensive and we were just doing this one event a year but people liked the meat, so I started doing catering of BBQ during the weekends. BBQ FOR YOU was a success and we made our name in fund raising BBQ chicken and pork, doing small parties and weekend outings. After the kids graduated and moved on I did not have to work so hard so I gave up working at it and now do it for fun...fun is best and the product better! Stick with me through this series of post today and I will do my best to show you how I do my BBQ. But first I have to go get my meat and spices for today, and some beer cause you can't Q without beer!