In return, they will stay heat up enough to help cook your food and give you picturesque grill marks. Another great component is the hinged grate’s circular insert where you can quickly add charcoals while cooking. You do have to take the whole grate off to re-adjust your fuel though, one of the few downsides. When grilling time is over, this again has an advantage over older kettle grills. The ash is swept into the bottom catcher for easy disposal once it’s cooled, while everything else only needs a quick wipe-down. To help find the right Weber grill for you, we tested popular models for weeks and rated each one on setup, heat retention, heat control, size, versatility, and overall value.
The total count on three-burner grills tends to vary between 30,000 Btu and 40,000 Btu. Our research, however, convinced us that whether those British thermal units are applied efficiently, steadily, and evenly across the grates is just as important, if not more so. They’re compact, yet they remain big enough to accommodate a complete family dinner (say, chicken breasts, corn on the cob, and another vegetable) or burgers and brats for a party.
I often have them sent to my folks’ house in New Hampshire and put them through their paces in the summertime while feeding a hungry crowd. One disaster involved a smoker company whose rep promised someone would come to pick it up the day before I was weber charcoal grill set to fly home to Seattle. I assumed “someone” meant a dude in a truck, not the college kid in a Buick SUV who knocked on my parents’ door. For most models, the basic structure will last for upwards of 10 years, and is covered under a large warranty.
While a giant 6-burner grill may not be for everyone, the Monument Denali is the perfect balance of modern thinking, a good price point, and quality that I would expect from our top pick. Like any smart modern grill, the Denali has temperature probes to accurately weber gas grill cook your food and uses an app to connect those probes to your phone. You can set the app to alert you when your food reaches the correct temperature or after a certain time limit. Here, Meathead Goldwyn’s reference cookbook Meathead is a big help.
Depending on the grill size, that means turning one or two burners off completely. To determine the best gas grill and get a feel for how these grills perform in a variety of cooking scenarios, we perform three tests. Based on different meats, methods and heat settings, these tests show us how efficiently and evenly a grill does (or doesn’t) cook.
Once the last burger in the basket reaches 145 degrees Fahrenheit, the batch is finished. A good burger in this test is one that has both a nice outside char and a slightly pink center. Grilled chicken should have a crispy skin and meat that is cooked through fully but not dry. We perform this test in three rounds, giving us a solid average cooking time for each grill. Whole chickens are cooked on indirect, medium heat until both breasts reach 165 degrees F. That’s an aesthetically pleasing compromise, but reaching through the side bars and around the panel to open and close the tank was frustratingly difficult.
In our tests, the Spirit II E-310 produced a better deep-and-crusty sear on hamburgers than even the Weber Genesis II E-310 (predecessor to our current upgrade pick). The smaller Spirit II E-310 concentrates weber charcoal grill the burners’ heat better, though the Genesis grill addresses that concern with an extra burner for searing. Grates come in a range of materials, and the differences in performance are small.
The Weber Spirit SX-315 Smart Grill is the smart version of our top pick, the Weber Spirit II E-310. The two models have the same bones—the same burners, side tables, and overall dimensions. The Spirit SX-315 connects to Wi-Fi and lets you monitor the meat probe through an app.