But those judgments would have to wait until we got our hands on the things. After weeks of research, reporting, and discussion, we settled on three charcoal grills to test. Based on our conversations with Joe Salvaggio of Big Apple BBQ and the many manufacturers at the Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Expo, we eliminated kamados and pellet griller-smokers for this guide. Those designs offer attractive versatility, but they’re also expensive—$350 at minimum, and the most popular and best-regarded styles run twice that or more. And Salvaggio noted that wood pellets simply don’t produce the searing heat you need to make perfect burgers or steaks. That doesn’t mean all charcoal grills are created equal, however.
Clean the grates before or after each use by brushing them free of cooked-on gunk and wiping them with a wet rag. Oil the grates after heating them, before you cook anything—it’ll help keep food from sticking. I prefer the weber, coated cast-iron grates to the plated steel grates the Original Kettle comes with, but there are worse things, and the plated steel still cooks relatively well. Because of the kettle-shape design, there’s no practical way to include a secondary cooking surface for cooking delicate items, warming buns, etc. I’ve used the charcoal snake to smoke on my kettle many times.
Finally, make sure to empty your ashes, and keep that grill covered when not in use. Every grill we tested had a hinged grate, a nice feature that lets you add or adjust the coals without lifting the whole grate off. We preferred the Weber and Napoleon designs, which each have a pair of hinged sections, on opposite edges of the grate, that let you directly access the entire bed of charcoal below. We noticed no performance differences, and all worked well, with no notable sticking of the items we cooked. Clean the cooking grate as you would any other grate — use a good grill cleaning tool to remove food debris (when it’s still warm), but don’t use anything metal. You may want to occasionally wash it with warm water and perhaps a mild soap.
While this grill does come with an included cart, which added to setup time, we also found the instructions hard to follow, and the amount of hardware included felt a bit overwhelming. If you’re weber q going to purchase this grill, then we’d advise looking into having your local hardware store build and deliver it to you. We loved the stability of this grill for manipulating the coal bed.
The SmokeFire series changes that with a design that can maintain temperatures as low as 200 degrees for smoking or as hot as 600 degrees for searing, making it an effective grill and smoker in one. It has similar output to the Spirit with three burners that pump out 39,000 BTUs of heat to its porcelain-coated cast-iron grates. The build is sturdier with welded beams replacing the sheet metal that makes up the frame of the Spirit grills.
The problem with many small charcoal grills is that they can be very difficult to work with. Not so with the Smokey Joe, which has been one of the most popular portable grills on the market since it debuted in 1955. The Smokey Joe is essentially a smaller version of Weber’s full-size kettle grill, complete with vents in the base and on the lid for temperature control. Its 14-inch cooking grate offers about 150 inches of cooking space, which is enough to handle a half-dozen burgers or a couple of steaks. A lower grate keeps the charcoal elevated off the bottom of the grill for optimal airflow, while a small tray under the lower vent catches ash for easy cleanup. If you’re committed to charcoal, but envious of your neighbor’s shiny gasser, the Napoleon Charcoal Professional Cart Grill may be the answer.
The Weber grill has three legs—an inherently stable design, because having three points of contact means the legs will automatically “find their level” even on bumpy ground. That said, the Napoleon model’s four legs felt just as stable, and more stiff, on a garden-variety concrete patio—and also allowed Napoleon to install a big, square shelf underneath the grill. The Weber grill has a smaller, triangular shelf, but it’s far less useful. Attaching the vent, ash catcher, and legs to the Weber is dead easy—everything simply snaps into place. We grilled large batches of burgers to test evenness of cooking and frequency of flare-ups .
He’ll show you how to prep them and share his recipe for grilling up whole fish on the Weber Q. In 1979, Weber started using the letter stamp (their ‘serial number’) weber genesis 2 to date their kettles. The modern plastic 6″ wheels with the word “WEBER” cut into the whitewall that is seen on basic Weber kettles today is in use by this time.