As an ex commercial salmon troller here in B.C., I’ve been smoking salmon, both hot and cold smoke for 40 years. Gebs:in your post you describe hot smoking your salmon and, as others have mentioned, I only use a wet brine if I’m hot smoking. My wet brine is based on Kummoks recipe, posted on this site with some minor variations: I use chopped up fresh garlic instead of garlic powder and I reduce the amount of cayenne from 3 T. To 1 T. As my wife cannot handle spicy foods. Dry brine comes into play when I’m cold smoking and with dry brine you have to be very careful on how you apply it. To make things easier in this regard, I only cold smoke centre fillets of my spring salmon as I find the thinner tails and belly parts too tricky to salt correctly. I dry brine first with salt, leave for 12 hours, then rinse the salt off and dry the fillets. If the fillets are over 1 1/2 “ thick, I make diagonal slices skin deep about an inch apart in the skin and rub the salt into the slices. Otherwise on bigger fish, the dry salt does not penetrate and you get an uneven cure. I then use brown sugar to brine and repeat the process. I then put a bit of cooking oil on and back into the fridge for overnight. I then use a rum soaked cloth to wipe the oil off, let the fillets dry and come up to room temp and they are ready to cold smoke. 2 hours rolling smoke, never letting the smoker get above 85 F. This produces a drier product than Spyguys wetbrine cold smoke (which I do once in awhile just for variation).
Cheers!
T2