About Pitwright and J. Bowman

Who writes this

I’m J. Bowman. I build Pitwright, write the guides, draw the Command Packs, and answer support emails. There’s no editorial team or ghostwriter. If a guide gets something wrong, that’s on me. I fix it.

My background is in software, not professional barbecue. Pitwright started with a scheduling question: if dinner is at six, when does the meat need to go on? Most barbecue advice leaves that to feel. Pitwright works backward from dinner.

The cooking guidance comes from backyard experience. I check it against published standards and the app’s own data, but I don’t pretend to be a professional pitmaster.

What Pitwright is

Four things, built to agree with each other:

• The app plans a cook backward from the meal time, tracks each cut through its stages as you log temperature readings, and keeps every finished cook in a local Pit Record.
• Learn guides answer the questions that come up mid-cook: what temperature, how long, when to wrap, when to pull.
• Free tools do the arithmetic: scaling a rub to a real piece of meat, looking up a cut, planning a brisket start time.
• Command Packs are printable cook-day playbooks for one cut, meant to sit on the counter next to the pit.

The app is the source of truth for cook data. The site mirrors it, and an automated check fails the build if the two drift apart, because a rub calculator that disagrees with the app is worse than no calculator.

How the guidance is researched

Three different kinds of claim appear in these guides, and they are held to three different standards:

• Food-safety minimums come from published government guidance, primarily the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service. Pages that state one name their sources at the bottom of the page. These numbers are not adjusted to taste.
• Barbecue targets such as pulling a brisket near 203°F are common practice, not standards. They are written as targets with the tenderness test that actually decides it, because the test outranks the number.
• Timing is an estimate and is always given as a range. Cut shape, weather, and the individual piece of meat move it by hours.

Where personal judgment is doing the work, the guide says so in the sentence rather than dressing it up as a finding.

What is not claimed here

No culinary credentials, no competition record, no restaurant kitchens, no food-science qualification, and no years-on-the-pit number. No product was lab tested, temperature probed on a bench, or run through a comparison Pitwright did not actually do. No reviews, ratings, testimonials, or user counts appear anywhere on this site, and the build fails if review or rating markup is ever added to a page.

A five-star graphic on the homepage is part of an illustrative example of the app’s cook log. It is a sample cook’s own rating inside the app, not a rating of Pitwright by anyone.

Corrections

Corrections are welcome and get made. Email [email protected] with the page and what is wrong. Guides show the date their substance last changed, and that date moves only when the content actually changes, never on a rebuild.

The working rules behind all of this are in editorial standards.