I drove a stick burner for decades and don't miss them. Even the best ones are a pain. If you must have one I'd recommend one of the smaller (but still fairly expensive) Lang or Yoder models. They have good designs that draw well and stay in a temp range longer than cheaper units. The cheap ones sold at big box stores are just heavy junk.
When properly set up, a good stick burner produces thin blue smoke just like a pellet cooker does. For more smoke you can throttle back the air and induce more smolder ("whiten" the smoke). Also, burning a partial mix of green wood will produce heavier wood flavor but at the expense of some control and more uncertainty in the flavor output.
My last stick burner was a Lang. I got the most consistent results by building a charcoal bed, then throttling back and using flavor wood chunks (dry). As long as the wind wasn't blowing (all bets are off when a stick burner has to work in the wind) I could maintain smoking temps (235-300 degrees) for three to four hours without tending. Nowadays, you could add a "stoker" (blower hooked to a controller) and probably get double that.
I have some friends that say using anything other than a stick burner is "unnatural" and that cooking using more modern appliances isn't really cooking. Maybe so, but they all come to contests in trucks with automatic transmissions and air conditioning, not in a wagon pulled by oxen
Hub
