Weber Kettle Grills Kettle Charcoal Grill : BBQGuys
Our favorite bird from this batch was the one cooked on the Weber, though it was a tough call. The bird cooked on the Nexgrill cart-style grill came in right behind, a close second in terms of flavor and texture. In our medium, indirect-heat chicken tests, the Nexgrill delivered flavorful, juicy meat as a close second to the Weber. And this updated model, when we used the charcoal snake method, demonstrated temperature control almost as good as the Weber. We tested the 22-inch Weber charcoal grill in black, but Weber also offers an 18-inch version of its original kettle design.
It’s also spawned plenty of copycats, most of them cheap knockoffs that aren’t worth the minor savings. What really sets the Premium version apart from the standard 22-inch kettle is the enclosed ash catcher, which eliminates concerns about stray embers and makes cleanup easy. From burgers to chicken to slow-smoked ribs, this Weber model’s time-tested design produces great results—at a terrific price. The Go-Anywhere is a good example of Weber’s quality dropping when the grill is below a certain price point. It yielded good charring and grill marks in our testing, but the temperature of the finished food varied by more than 15 degrees. The Spirit II E-310 is a perfectly fine gas grill, just not an exceptional one.
It was also impressively easy to assemble, and the built-in cart and shelves (there’s no cartless option) would be welcome on a patio that doesn’t have a worktable of its own. Readings from our own thermocouples, plus a digital pit , confirmed this. Cooking over charcoal takes longer than cooking with a gas grill, and we typically need to add more fuel during cooking to keep our grills above 350 degrees F for the full duration.
And Joe Salvaggio of Big Apple BBQ noted that wood pellets simply don’t produce the searing heat you need to make perfect burgers or steaks. We also compared how each of these grills performed in our grilling tests and evaluated other parts of the user experience, such as vent control and assembly. For most items over 150 pounds our free standard shipping weber charcoal grill service will be freight and will include free curb-side delivery and lift gate service. Upon delivery, the driver will take it off the truck for you but it is your responsibility to bring it onto your property. We inventory many of our products in our warehouse in North Liberty, Iowa to provide quick and flexible shipping options for the entire country.
There were some flare-ups during cooking, and we found about a 15-degree difference between foods cooked in the front and those in the back and center. It performed on par with competitors when it came to smoke flavor in our long-smoke tests, and it left a nice char and browning in our short-smoke experiments. It didn’t fare as well in our searing tests, however, leaving burgers looking more pan-seared than grilled.
The pop-up stand takes little effort to operate, and the wheels make moving the grill from the car to the cooking spot a simple task. The Traveler requires assembly, a job that took us about 15 minutes, weber portable grill and given its heat retention, it cooled quickly, making it easier to pack after cooking. We suggest taking out the grill grates to scrub them, though, as cleaning them made the entire setup shake.
The hinged sides and pop-out center of the grate are nice for adding charcoal while cooking. We found it difficult, however, to use these to arrange or bank the coals without burning ourselves, as it required us to remove the entire grate for safety. For direct cooks where I want a low heat to slowly cook over the coals for more than 30 minutes I use the same set up; a heat source and a fuel source. The image below on the left is the setup I used to cook the half chickens shown on the right. I mop/basted the chickens while cooking directly over the coals for an hour.
The Napoleon grill’s four legs, versus the Weber grill’s three, make this grill more stable and allow for a nice, big shelf underneath. Dump the handy ash catcher and scrub the grates each time you cook. After spending two days cooking 40 pounds of burgers, BBQ, and whole chickens, we recommend the Weber Original Kettle Premium Charcoal Grill 22″. Thanks to more than seven decades of continuous refinement, it’s the most versatile, most user-friendly, and best-performing charcoal grill we’ve tested. While the grill requires assembly, Weber “seemed to make assembly an enjoyable part of the overall experience rather than merely a task to [complete] as quickly as possible,” as one tester said.
The Napoleon grill, which we otherwise didn’t love, is a generous 34 inches in height at the grate, making it more comfortable to work on. Because this grill is so popular, both Weber and other manufacturers offer a bunch of add-ons (such as charcoal baskets, pizza stones, and rotisseries) that increase its capabilities. Once we knew the Weber was our pick, we used a popular third-party accessory, the Slow ‘N Sear Deluxe charcoal basket, to smoke a rack of baby-back ribs. The grill performed terrifically, turning out tender ribs with great smoky flavor. The Weber Original Kettle Premium Charcoal Grill’s design makes controlling the heat simple.
– I found the key to getting a kettle grill to do what you want it to do lies in the setup. Most weber charcoal grills do not have an ignition system, needing to be lit the old-fashioned way. However, some models are designed with electronic Touch-N-Go ignition switches that make lighting up charcoal even easier. We measured charcoal in a chimney by grams, and in a ratio for that grill’s specific surface area.