Bradley Smoke Generator

Build your own BBQ Smokehouse. The Bradley Smokers Smoke Generator allows you to make your own food smoking cabinet very easily.

The Bradley Smoke Generator is a highly adaptable unit that allows you to retrofit almost any small structure into a smoke house. The unit consists of two parts. The Smoke Generator is fabricated from powder-coated steel, and fulfills the same purpose as the smoke generator which is fitted to the Original Bradley Smoker - advancing the bisquettes onto the heat element at a rate of one every twenty minutes.  The Smoke Generator design is reminiscent of the older models of Bradley Smoker, now superceded. This is of no consequence as the controls are limited to a power on / off switch, and a bisquette advance button, used to position the first bisquette on the burner. Thereafter, bisquettes feed automatically.

The second part of the apparatus consists of a stainless steel face-plate, with an adjustable collar onto which the smoke generator fits by means of two lugs. This allows the smoke generator to be easily removed from the faceplate in order to facilitate cleaning and storage. The intention is that the faceplate remains permanently attached to the structure that you use for smoking. 

The picture shows the Smoke Generator lugged onto the face-plate of the Adaptor, and the adjustable Adaptor Collar can also be seen. When fitted, the wall of the smoke-house structure fits between the faceplate and the collar.

The unit uses Bradley Flavour Bisquettes. It is particularly well suited to cold smoking. Where the cabinets fitted to the other models are insulated, this causes heat to built up within the cabinets, which mitigates against cold smoking. However, the chances are that the your home made structure will be of a considerably larger volume, and may not be insulated. As a consequence, you are highly unlikely to experience any built up of heat in your structure, and providing the ambient temperature is low enough:below about 28 deg C, then you will have no difficulty cold smoking.  For the other Bradley Smoker models, we recommend the use of the Cold Smoke Adaptor accessory when cold smoking.     

An ideal structure might be an old chest freezer, stood upright, the lid for the door, with an 11 cm hole in the side for the adaptor, and a vent in the top in order to allow for a natural draft to flow through the structure. It is important that this draft occurs, both in terms of the quality of the smoked product, and to stop smoke being drawn back into the Smoke Generator. if this does occur then it would eventually cause a build up of tar on the mechanism. 

A blueprint to build your own smokehouse is included with the unit and is available in pdf format on the Specifications tab. 

Bradley Smoke Generators are used to considerable effect by small time producers of, for example smoked hams, bacon and salmon. We have many users in the UK who are able to run successful smoking businesses just by using one or more Bradley Smoke Generators.

A question we are often asked is what size of smokehouse can be sustained by a Bradley Smoke Generator. There are many variables that would effect the answer so conducting careful scientific experiments would be unlikely to be helpful, however an 12 ft square room is well within capacity. If you really are looking for a solution of this magnitute then you would in any case be advised to deploy two generators, keeping one as a spare if needed.