One of the reasons behind the popularity of charcoal grills is their low cost of entry. The most basic grills cost as little as $30 and are totally capable of cooking up a gameday masterpiece. Grills at this price are also fairly portable, so they’re great for cookouts at the park or outside your team’s stadium.
The 120-pound weight limits portability, even with wheels, but it also makes this a sturdy backyard companion for years to come. Powder coating protects the exterior from the elements. An additional cooking grate is a great place to roast vegetables above your meat to maximize space. Control airflow with an adjustable vent, and keep an eye on cooking temperatures with a built-in thermometer. Two wooden exterior shelves provide a convenient workspace where you can keep your tools, spices, and a frosty beverage or two.
When you think about the ash catcher’s job—to capture hot ashes and embers—the tiny screws don’t inspire much confidence. 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 . 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. Throughout, we also tested our “necessities”—accessories such as spatulas, tongs, grill brushes, and sheet pans.
As a result, ribs cooked in the Weber came out tender, juicy and full of smoky flavor. In the case of kettle models, we arrange coals in a semicircle around the grill’s inner wall. The charcoal briquettes form a line two coals wide and two coals deep. We also drop a few chunks of smokewood on top of the snake . On cart-style grills, we modify the snake to run in right angles to match their rectangular-shaped fireboxes. For our tests, each grill gets a full chimney of lit charcoal and a 6-pound chicken opposite the coals for indirect heat.
The wood on the 1970s and 80s versions really classed things up. Our R&D department develops high-quality, fairly priced grilling equipment. Built to Last- Charcoal Weber Grills feature a tried and true design and solid engineering. Weber believes in the weber charcoal grill quality and craftsmanship of their grills, and offer the warranty to back it up. If you want a charcoal grill to last decades, then this is the brand for you. And with a lifetime warranty, you can worry less about rust or how it holds up to the elements.
The 22-inch Napoleon Rodeo Charcoal Kettle Grill (model number NK22CK-L) is considered one of the better Weber clones available (the pros at AmazingRibs.com, among others, rate it highly). In our cooking tests it performed well, though not quite as well as the Weber. In particular, we didn’t find its unique heat-diffusing plate—a shallow metal dome that sits in the middle of the coal bed—to be as effective portable bbq as we would have liked. However, at 34 inches at the grates, it’s nearly counter height, and a full 7 inches taller than the Weber, so it was less tiring to work on. The Napoleon’s four legs, versus the Weber’s three, make this grill more stiff and stable, and allow for a nice big shelf underneath. When it came to assembly, the only direct comparison we could make was between the Weber and the Napoleon.