Cinnamon-Coffee Brisket Rub

Makes About 1 cup — enough for one 12–14 lb packer brisket

Central Texas brisket is salt and pepper, and anybody who tells you different is selling something. But there’s room inside that tradition for a little more, as long as what you add disappears into the bark instead of sitting on top of it.

This is a salt-and-pepper rub at heart — coarse ground, heavy-handed, nothing that burns at 250°F over twelve hours. The coffee and cinnamon are there for depth, not for flavour you can name. If someone eats a slice and says “is that cinnamon?”, you used too much.

On the cinnamon

Two teaspoons in a full cup of rub is deliberate. Cinnamon in barbecue works the way it works in a mole — underneath everything, filling in the gap between the coffee’s bitterness and the brown sugar’s sweetness. Push it past a tablespoon and it stops being background and starts tasting like a dessert spice on beef, which is not what anybody wants at eleven in the morning.

Use Ceylon cinnamon rather than cassia if you have it. Cassia is hotter and more aggressive, and at these quantities it will push forward and announce itself. Ceylon is softer and stays where you put it. There’s more on the difference in Ceylon vs Cassia in a BBQ Rub.

Storage

Keep it in a sealed jar out of the light. The coffee is the first thing to go — after about six weeks it flattens out and the rub loses its edge, so mix in batches you’ll get through. Salt and pepper will outlive all of us; the aromatics won’t.

Notes

• Scaling: the ratio that matters is equal parts salt and pepper. Everything else is a fraction of that. Double or halve straight down the list.
• Beef ribs: works as-is. Short ribs take it particularly well.
• Pork: too savoury. Use the Sweet Heat Pork Rub instead.
• No binder purists: you don’t need mustard. A wet hand and a light spritz of water does the same job and the mustard cooks off anyway.

Method

1. Check your pepper

   This lives or dies on 16-mesh butcher-grind pepper. Fine table pepper turns bitter and dusty over a long cook and won't build texture in the bark.

2. Mix dry

   Combine everything in a bowl and whisk with a fork until the colour is even. Break up any clumps in the brown sugar with your fingers.

3. Rest it

   Seal it in a jar and leave it a day before use. The coffee and cinnamon need time to distribute through the salt.

4. Apply

   Trim the fat cap to about a quarter inch, bind with a thin coat of yellow mustard or water, then apply from twelve inches up so it falls evenly.

5. Let it sweat

   Thirty minutes at room temperature, until the rub has gone from powdery to tacky and dark. Then it goes on the smoker.