The 12 Best Accessories for Your Weber Kettle Charcoal Grill

For the same reason, don’t let your charcoal grill sit out in the rain, as the resulting lye will quickly corrode any metal it touches. Instead, bring your grill into a garage, put it under an awning, or tent it with a grill cover (in every case, after the ash is cool). 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. Nothing beats the smoky barbecue flavor that can only be created on a charcoal grill.

This will fully snuff out your fire and make it safe to remove ashes and spent coals later on when everything has cooled. A scoop, small shovel, or spade can come in handy if your grill doesn’t have an easy catchment and/or removal system. It’s hard not to love weber q the design of the Weber Original Kettle 22-inch charcoal grill. It’s been around for decades with hardly any changes, and it probably belongs in the Museum of Modern Art. Some of the ash will fall through to the ash catcher a few inches below the bowl.

This is a straight-up charcoal grill that would be right at home in a Norman Rockwell painting. Broadrick says that consistency has elevated the charcoal grill into something more. “At this point, the Weber Kettle is more of a platform than a stand-alone product,” he says. Out of dozens of community-driven updates and upgrades, these are the best Weber Kettle add-ons that money can buy. We believe that everyone should have access to high-quality grills at an affordable price, which is why we purchase grills by the truckload and pass the savings on to you!

weber charcoal grill

It’s about waist level in height for almost everyone, so it’s quite comfortable to cook on. The 363-square-inch cooking area can easily handle a pair of whole chickens or about 10 to 13 burgers, depending on how large you make your patties. Any more than that and the grill can get overloaded, making it difficult to cook everything evenly and to flip the patties. The Cuisinart Black Kettle Grill is one of the smallest we tested with its 18-inch kettle. It’s similar in size to the Weber Original Kettle Charcoal Grill, though unlike that grill, it comes with an ash pan and a thermometer. However, a major downside to this grill was that the built-in thermometer barely worked.

We only recommend products we genuinely like, and purchases made through our links support our mission and the free content we publish here on AoM. Karl likes to spread the charcoal so that it covers about half of the kettle. Then, I called my friend and resident AoM meat-cooking consultant, Karl Engel, and asked him to show me the ropes on how to cook with it. After enjoying the sound of a newly birthed charcoal fire, we’d stand around the grill and watch the flame slowly get smaller and smaller, and the charcoal get whiter and whiter.

Our experts lean toward lump charcoal due to the lack of additives often found in briquettes. BBQGuys has the largest selection of charcoal Weber Grills available, and our BBQ experts are standing by 7 days a week to answer any questions you may have about this iconic brand. We can help you find the Weber grill that will keep you and your family cooking for years to come. portable bbq We measured the temperature of the grill surface, as well as the internal temperature of the chicken, with an external thermometer to ensure that any built-in temperate gauges were accurate. For the most part, the built-in thermometers were accurate, with the exception of the Cuisinart gauge, which barely registered any temperature throughout our testing process.

If you’re someone who doesn’t smoke meat and has no interest in doing so, I wouldn’t even consider buying the SNS Kettle. The enamel is baked on at 1,500F – which is enough to hold up to any heat you throw at the grill as well as potential rust and burn through problems. Typically, prices drop in the Winter months when demand is low and increases in the Summer when demand is high – If you’re in the market for a new grill, always wait till Winter. The only thing extra that you need for assembly is a mallet or hammer to tap the wheel hub caps on. Everything else that you need to assemble the grill comes packaged. The Weber kettle was the first grill I ever learned on and is perfect for beginners.

Whether entertaining on a small patio or in a big backyard, the need to grill has no limits. After dinner, fold down the side table, push together your chairs, and toast to the Performer charcoal grill. After testing and reviewing it for over 6 months, I can safely safe I’m a big fan of the Slow N’ Sear, however, I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary to make smoking feasible on a charcoal grill. Having said all of this, this upgrade is not necessary to smoke on the weber kettle. If you’re someone who has never smoked meat before and you look at the lid thermometer, you might panic when you see 400F on your lid thermometer. The above is the most basic arrangement for charcoal when smoking meat.

It can even walk you through the grilling process, letting you know when it’s time to flip food—a handy option for novice grillers. We measured charcoal in a chimney by grams, and in a ratio for that grill’s specific surface area. We lit the charcoal inside the chimney, letting it burn until the smoke dissipated and the coals began to turn grayish-white, then put the charcoal into the grill. After the grill was heated up for 10 minutes, the steaks were ready to hit the grill grate. The PK Grills company has recognized the need for an update, and in February 2017, it launched the PK360, a bigger, slicker design with front access vents and a better lid attachment.