[Music] I'm ready hey guys welcome to mad scientist BBQ I'm Jeremy oder and today I'm at the BBQ HQ and we're gonna examine the question how do I choose a smoker if you watch these videos before welcome back if this is your first time welcome if you have any questions while you're watching the video you can leave in the comments below and I'll do my best to get to them also you can subscribe and hit the notification bell so you get informed every time I put out new informative BBQ content now the three things that we have to consider when choosing a BBQ smoker are number one what is your budget because if this is wrong then the other two points don't matter the second thing is what kind of cooker do you want to use and the third thing you're looking at is how much capacity does that smoker have does it fit your needs for point number one budget this is the most important thing to consider as with many other things in life with smokers you get what you pay for so if you spend a little bit of money you're not going to get a whole lot of quality usually now there are some bargains out there there's some deals there are some things that are overpriced but the general rule is true if you spend good money on a barbecue you will get good quality for your money so we're going to break this down into three groups so we have below 500 dollars 500 to 1500 dollars and $1500 and above I think those are probably pretty good gauges of how much people are willing to spend and we're going to try to give you multiple examples of smokers in each price range the second thing to consider is what kind of smoker you want to use there's some that are very labor intensive like offset smokers and then some that are mostly hands off like pellet smokers and there are gradations in between so we're gonna take a look at several different kinds here and talk about the merits of each kind and hopefully after that you'll get a good idea of which kind of pit you want now one note smokers can be referred to by many different names you can call it a pitch you can call it a cooker you can call it a smoker you can call it a barbecue a lot of different names we're talking about the same thing if you're using it for low and slow cooking meat that is a barbecue it's a smoker all the same thing for what we're talking about today for our purposes then the final thing want to examine is capacity now I have a rule of thumb when people ask me about what smoker they should buy I always ask them what's the maximum number of people you think you'll ever have to cook for and they'll tell me a number say 30 I always tell them double it and get a smoker that's that size because invariably I have people saying oh hey I'm trying to cook for this many people but my smoker will only cook for half that amount what do I do that happens all the time so if you get a smoker that's twice the size of what you think you need you'll be able to deal with any kind of situation that could potentially come up now we're ready to look at some of the smokers and we're gonna start with our $500 and below budget range the first smoke that we're gonna look at that's under $500 is this Green Mountain Grylls Daniel Boone arvin the manager here at the BBQ HQ actually owns one so he's going to talk us through some of the details but first I just want to talk about pellet smokers in general really briefly so pellet smokers are an incredibly convenient way to do barbecue you fill up the hopper with pellets you turn it on you set the temperature and you can walk away for a long time and it will run on its own you can get pellets and a lot of different places and for a lot of people the right answer for what kind of smoker you should get is a pellet smoker and so Arvind can you talk us through this smoker in particular what's the price of the smoker how much can you fit on it and what's your experience with it so here we have the Daniel Boone choice model the retails for $4.99 I don't have this exact model I have their prime version but you can fit I mean I've cooked briskets I've cooked pulled pork chicken hamburgers you know sausages baked zucchini bread in there done pizzas especially you could add their pizza attachment there's also other companies out there that have like GMG has their second rack and then there's other companies that have like a fuller rack that you could add that gives you more space so you can even double up their load you can do almost let's say even with the second rack you can do about three or four briskets okay I've had it where I've had to turn two briskets sideways I've gotten two gets in there so this thing is it cooks I mean great barbecue for a pillow grill and for a price range at $4.99 one more thing how many pounds of pellets can you fit into this hopper others this hopper holds 20 pounds of pellets and how long does that usually last if you're cooking it's a 225 there's a lot of variances that you have to throw in a matter because you got your temperature outside yeah you know what you're cooking so it could range anywhere from you know if you're cooking at 225 maybe 10 to 18 hours just depending on you know all those backers and you know that's the biggest thing I get that question a lot and kind of hard because you know if it's a hundred degrees out yeah then you're gonna use a lot less pellets if it's 50 degrees out you're gonna be burning a lot more to keep that dry rub sure so do you think you could cook a whole brisket with one hopper full I know you you would have to like fill up you know that's usually what I do I'm very you know on it I hate to worry about it so I always I always top it off every time I check I always top it off yeah that's just a habit I have yeah but you can definitely do ribs you can definitely do chicken a bunch of stuff you can cook for quite a while with just one hopper yes so you're not gonna have to be you know waiting around like checking it every 10 minutes it'll go for a long time okay so that adds to the convenience factor and that's one of the many reasons why pellet smokers are so popular next we're gonna look at the weber smokey mountain this is a very very common smoker there are lots of people have them and get great success with them so there are some benefits to using something like this over a pellet smoker so how it smokers have to be plugged into work this doesn't have to have any wires going to it so if you're in a really remote location you can use this where you might not be able to use a pellet smoker also moving this thing is going to be lighter and easier than trying to drag around a pellet smoker somewhere and then finally this thing has a built-in water pan that makes it really easy to keep a good level of moisture in the cook chamber basically this big one this 22 inch model is $439 BBQ HQ and II have two nice big acts underneath this lid so you can fit even the beefiest of briskets no pun intended the biggest briskets you could cook 20 pounders in here and there's another rack underneath so you could do two 20 pound briskets and put some other things on the side you can want it to below that is the water pan and then below that is where the charcoal and wood chunks go so you put in your charcoal and wood chunks at the lowest layer you like those then you use the vent on the top and the vents on the bottom to dial in the temperature to just what you want and then once it's dialed in it will continue to stay at that temperature for a long long time this is a very convenient way to get real barbecue and it doesn't take up too big of a footprint in terms of how much floor space it takes out but you get a lot of cooking space those are some of the reasons people really love these things one other feature that I wanted to mention that's really well-thought-out is you can actually through this door add fuel during the middle of the cook so you don't have to pull your meat out and go through a huge hassle you open the door you throw in some charcoal you throw in some wood chunks if you want to add more wood for more flavor and then you close it back up and you're ready to cruise for another I don't know 8 10 hours now I would be remiss if I didn't mention a weber kettle I bet that probably more briskets have been cooked on weber kettle than any other kind of backyard smoker now weber kettles are extremely versatile you can use them to grill you can use them to slow smoke you can do a ton of things with weber kettles but they're not really designed to be used for smoking alone therefore it's not an ideally suited smoker so you can use it for smoking but if you're in the market for something that's just going to be used for slow smoking meat I would suggest using other avenues instead like the smokey mountain or a pellet smoker or a pit barrel cooker or something like that that's designed exclusively for smoking because I think you're going to get better results now if you just have one of these you can absolutely smoke great quality stuff on it it's just going to be easier with other cookers at least in my opinion and then for the record the price on this guy today is $329 to give you an idea of how this compares to the other smokers we've just seen right the last pit in our below $500 section is going to be the pit barrel cooker so essentially it's a barrel and you put coals at the bottom would chunks at the bottom and then there these pieces of rebar that you see right here that run through and then also these service air vents these holes so it's already kind of all calculated so you don't actually have to do any adjusting it will on its own run at a correct temperature to cook barbecue also from this rebar they have hooks that you can use to hang meat and then also if you don't want to do that you can actually place me on a grate directly below the rebar and you can cook things that really wouldn't do well hanging up so much this is a very very easy and convenient way to do barbecue and also because you're hanging the meat directly above the coals the rendered fat and things like that will drip down out of the coals and give it extra flavor more of a kind of a grilled flavor than you would get necessarily on other cookers and this is on sale here today for 350 dollars there's also a pit barrel jr. and I believe that's $229 I'm not a hundred percent sure on that but an inexpensive way to get real barbecue and a very convenient way to do it all right now we're moving on to 500 to 1500 dollar budget range and this is going to be our first offset smoker and you may have noticed that I didn't include any offset smokers in the $500 and below budget range let me explain why when you get an offset smoker there are some things that are very important one of those things is the thickness of the metal itself and $500 and below is going to be extremely difficult to find a smoker that's got thick enough metal to work well now you could get something like an Oklahoma Joe and use it and it's possible to create great barbecue with it the only thing is it's very very difficult to do so if you're somebody out there who's making great Q on an Oklahoma Joe I salute you well done just for the majority of people it's so difficult to maintain a consistent temperature and to burn a clean fire that they end up ruining tons of meat not through any fault of their own necessarily but just because the smoker is so hard to work with when you get to higher price ranges where they start to use thicker metal and there's you know greater care and construction offset smokers become a great choice because simply put nothing replaces the flavor you get from a real wood fire now you can get great barbecue on a lot of smokers offset smokers simply produce the best quality flavor but they're also the most inconvenient to use you have to be checking the fire you have to be moving it around you have to be added wood all the time and just ask yourself this question why would people go through all that hassle in using an offset smoker the answer is very simple because it produces the best possible flavor that's why people go through all the trouble now when you get to something that's well-constructed sky's the limit to how good your barbecue can be but the cheaper stuff it's really I encourage people not to get them I would say spend your money elsewhere you're gonna have more success with other kinds of cookers at that price point now moving on to this one this is the Meadowcreek SQ 36 I've cooked on one of these quite a few times now and for the price it is very very good some other things I want to mention first the Old Country barbecue pits brazos that I've used in a ton of videos I love that thing that's a thousand dollars it's still in the same price point I'll include a link to my full review of that smoker and why I like it but let's talk about this one now this is really really really superb because it has a baffle plate that evens out the temperature across the whole surface of the cooker it's got the second rack that you can include you have a lot of space you could do probably one two three briskets and a couple of pork butts on this thing and it is very solidly constructed now I'll be the first to admit it's not the prettiest smoker I've ever seen but I don't really care about that I care about how it cooks this thing is an absolute champ you know it's not the thickest smoker in the world but it's at that level of thickness that you could start to produce great offset barbecue one other note if you saw my video on the wag you beef belly burn ins we cooked it on one of these smokers I've used it quite a few times in the past for different purposes and I recommend it if you want to spend 1460 bucks this is a great way to do it this smoker is widely available it's made by Meadowcreek by the Amish in Pennsylvania and just a great choice for an entry-level offset smoker there are other options of course there yoader's their horizons they're a bunch of offset smokers out there but to me I think once you get to quality there's not a big gradation until you get to custom so there's a threshold below which you don't want to buy an offset smoker because they're junk and then you have good and then you have really good when you go to custom very expensive levels this to me somewhere between this and the old country Brazos I think those are you know a perfect place to get into offset smoking next up we have our first pellet grill between 500 and 1500 dollars so for $8.99 we have this Green Mountain grills and it's not only bigger so you have more capacity in terms of how much you can cook but it's got some additional features and so to explain some of those we have our oven to give us the lowdown so what makes this one different than the basic model okay so this one is the prime version of the green mountain girls and this is a Jim Bowie so in here we have our custom greats sold separately but you just got more cooking space with the prime model so you have this the window which at is a nice added feature you can actually look in and see the food cooking so you don't have to open it lose heat yeah close it back down yeah so you can take a look through and then the prime version also comes with front shelf as well as a window in the hopper so now you can see that level will fell it's in there and it also has Wi-Fi oh so what so you can interact with it with your phone and stuff yes correct change temperature and stuff like that yeah you sure can't and in turn on and off Wow okay so you could be sitting on your couch in front of your TV and you could look out here see that you're you know you have enough pellets or you might be running out you can change the temperature you can turn it off all from you know your phone yes okay alright that's pretty cool now my my big 500 gallon smoker I can't do any of those things it's way more of a pain in the butt to deal with that one so that's nice to know and so what do you think for capacity we could we could fit in here I'm I'm thinking maybe two one two at least three briskets on the bottom and a couple more on the top one five six briskets in them oh yeah definitely yeah with art with the custom grates that we make definitely normally it would come without this top rack and it'd be a little bit different grates but you could get three briskets on there okay Wow all right now let's move on all right I know this is a big scenery change but here M at my place and I want to mention this smoker in that 500 to 1500 dollar range I believe this one sells for $12.99 on Academy Sports and for a lot of people this is a great option I'm not gonna belabor a bunch of points but if you're interested in the smoker I will link a video where I break down how the smoker works and give you kind of a tour of the smoker but let me give you a simple abbreviated version basically this is a gravity-fed smoker you feed charcoal into the chute so you fill it up and if you fill up a full chute it can last for 12 to 15 hours you put wood chunks underneath and you have the main cook chamber right here and it's got a lot of space you could easily do six briskets you could do a ton of food in there and it doesn't have too big of a footprint also it's insulated which means that even if it's cold if it's windy this smoker will still work and not give you problems with great heat fluctuations also you can add something like BBQ guru or another fan system that monitors the temperature inside and then regulates air coming in so you have a perfectly regulated temperature for as long as you want it now that's enough for this for now if you're really interested in this I'll link some videos below it's got tremendous flavor and when I do the recap of everything I'll give you a little bit more information about my opinion on the smoker ok now we are moving on to $1500 and above at this point you're shelling out serious money and hopefully have a serious pit to cook your barbeque first we're gonna look at is this Quemado Joe it's a ceramic cooker so it's a japanese-inspired cooking style and this one is about 1,900 bucks and what you get with this is coals on the bottom you can add in wood chunks you can use it for grilling you can use it for a wide variety of purposes much like the Weber Kettle this thing can do a lot of different things and of course it can't do anything perfectly but it does a lot of things extraordinarily well and you also have the benefit of a million aftermarket gizmos and gadgets to use for specific purposes so you want to do direct coal grilling you can rotisserie and install it here and get great stuff I've had great results in the past with that you can get gadgets that separate your charcoal to one side or the other so you have better indirect cooking for low and slow barbecue you can fire this thing up to get to 700 degrees no problem if you want to sear the heck out of a steak this thing can do a lot of different things extremely well but it's not a dedicated smoker but for a lot of people this makes the most sense rather than investing a bunch of money in a great grill and then a bunch of money in a great smoker they can have something that can do blow so let's open this up and here you see this is the grate and it's actually pretty big you could fit two briskets on there I've cooked briskets on kimonos before and just as long as you include enough wood chunks you can get good smoke flavor and typically when you dial in the vent on the bottom and the vent on the top it will hold temperature steady pretty well but this I would pay attention to because it's ceramic it retains heat super well so it can get kind of a runaway effect you might walk away for an hour and if you're not used to this thing it might climb another hundred degrees if you're unprepared for it so just keep an eye on it until you got the pit mastered one other benefit of this is that because it's ceramic and retains heat so incredibly well you could use this thing in sub-zero temperatures and still sear steaks at over 700 degrees it's very good for that also if you're in windy conditions you're still gonna have no problem maintaining temperature in this beast one downside because of the ceramic is it's pretty darn heavy it's not easy to move around with one person it's on rollers you can move it around but you can't just pick it up and carry it and put it in your truck it's not that kind of smoker next we have the piston spits maverick 1250 now I have one of these and first let me say I really really really like it on days when I want barbecue but I don't have time to sit out manage a fire you know for 12 14 16 hours I can put it on here and get something that I still really enjoy but I hit the power button I walk away I come back eight hours later I wrap I walk away I come back four hours later and it's done so this thing incredibly convenient also it's built like a tank just funny story about that I actually had mine on my truck I was bringing it home from the store and I decided I thought it would be a good idea to try to unload it myself stupid idea basically what happened is I was trying to take it off the truck and it just fell and crashed and rolled and I thought oh man there goes you know just $2,500 paid down the tubes but I set it up right and I realized there's nothing there's nothing wrong except the only thing that was damaged was this little cover for the smokestack so I called Pitts and spitz they sent me another one I felt bad and not a single problem using this Pitt it's been absolutely beautiful also it's a tank because it's made out of pretty thick steel in comparison to most pellet smokers so it really retains heat extremely well and side benefit even though this is made out of thick steel the lid is very easy for anybody to open so it slides rather than having to lift up you know 50 pounds worth of metal you can just slide it up and down you know a lot of offset smokers in particular it can be really difficult to lift up the lid for a lot of people this one slides smooth as glass boom open and shut really really great cooker now another thing that's awesome about this beast is that the hopper holds 35 pounds of pellets so you can use you know one hopper full of pellets to do an entire brisket cook and I didn't have to worry about running out so you start at the beginning but the full hopper pellets you're good to go also in terms of capacity this thing is great you can cook six first gets on here and it's not even really breaking a sweat and then also because it has the defuse will plate in there it kind of has an even cooking temperature you're not going to burn anything anywhere on the smoker because the heat is nice and evenly distributed there aren't really hot spots and finally there are some cool accessories that you can use with this thing so it's not just the smoker that's what its best at but it can also be used to grill directly so you can remove one baffle plate and then there's another baffle plate you can put in with a trap door so you can actually directly over the fire pot and so you can use that to sear steaks so you could do a reverse sear put it in there let it go and you know say 225 degrees until you reach an internal temperature say 125 that you want you pull it off you open that trap door you turn this thing up to 600 degrees and you sear the heck out of those steaks and have tremendous flavor on the exterior needless to say I really love this thing and what's a lot of money but I don't regret getting this thing at all the final smoker I'm going to mention in the $1,500 Plus range is this this is a custom smoker that I ordered and simply put I absolutely love this thing the best barbecue I've ever made in my entire life has come off of this and it's not even close essentially it's just the same basic design as a regular backyard offset smoker except it's going to be made from an old propane tank which means it's already the right shape its minimum quarter inch thick steel and the end caps I think are beneficial on the firebox side it seems that the heat goes up and then curls into the end cap so that you don't have you know crazy hot spot right next to the firebox and then this end cap seems to kind of help collect to the smoke and heat and direct it toward the stack another benefit of doing something like this is tremendous capacity I've cooked as much as 350 pounds of brisket on this thing at one time you can cook a lot of food and then finally in terms of flavor there's nothing like a real wood fire and then also there's nothing like the fire that you can create in a smoker like this if you have a big pit you know 250 500 a thousand gallons the amount of smoke flavor that you generate from your fire is going to be superior to everything else out there so there are two reasons why top barbecue spots use an offset smoker and it isn't because it's convenient because it's not convenient the two reasons are number one you can build them big and have a lot of capacity and number two and in my opinion the most important reason is because you can't recreate that kind of smoke flavor any other way so if you wanted something like this you're probably looking to spend and then $10,000 there are other custom backyard size smokers out there for me that didn't really seem to make sense for you know where I wasn't what I was doing I had a good backyard offset smoker that I loved I mean I'm gonna still have it's it's a great pit I love cooking on it it's just when my needs outgrew the backyard size I went with something like this because the difference that you get in a backyard smoker an offset that is that's very good and one that's custom is simply you get things put together the way you want to and if it's already put together the way you want to and you don't want to make major changes then I think you're better off getting a good quality standard regular backyard pit now this thing I got to choose whatever I wanted I got to choose the height of the smokestack I got to choose whether I had reverse flow or standard flow I got to choose how many thermometers I had I got to choose you know the width of the trailer I got to choose that there's a wood rack on the backside where I can fit you know quarter of a cord of wood all those things make a custom smoker unique to your needs and your preferences and that's why I think it's one of those things that's worth the money if you have the money and you have the need to put in perspective what you're able to do with a smoker like this I once had an event where I had to feed 800 people and I cooked everything on this smoker now it wasn't easy basically it was 24 hours of continuous cooking as the first things came off new meat went on and you know it was a labor intensive and time intensive process but it was capable of producing that much food and we didn't even run short we actually had some extra so this thing is just I would call it a tank but it's obviously already a tank but it's just a powerhouse and it does everything I want it to do one other thing about five hundred gallon offsets is that to me they're the perfect marriage of large size and controllability usually with a thousand gallon pit you know it's it's harder to if you want to jump the temperature 40 degrees 50 degrees you really have to work at it for a while this thing it's pretty rapid if you want to cool down the temperature you can do it pretty rapidly on this too but it's still large enough to cook a big big quantity of meat so for me and my purposes this was the perfect size and I just love this thing so let's wrap up what we've seen here okay this is my opinion there are plenty of people out there who are more than happy to disagree with me and I don't hold anything against them this is just my opinion from my experience when we're talking about smokers on the one side in terms of flavor we have offsets that in my opinion produce the best flavor and they are simply kind of the the pinnacle of what you can create in barbecue then on the other end of the spectrum we have something that's super easy but just doesn't produce as much flavor that would be a pellet smoker so offsets great flavor a lot of work pellet smokers good flavor almost no work and then the other smokers fall somewhere in between and where they fall in between is just a matter of personal taste and personal preference I think the gravity-fed smoker is the closest I've come to getting offset type flavor but they're still definitely a difference things like weber smokey mountain or weber kettle or a quemado doe they seem to have a touch more smoke flavor than a pellet smoker sometimes maybe it all just depends basically if you cook your barbecue really well on any of those other pits you can still get great stuff you just won't have the depth of a smoke flavor that you get with an offset now let me cut to the bottom line here what are my recommendations for each price point $500 and under I would say get a pellet smoker they aren't you know super fancy or anything like that but you're more likely to produce good barbecue on one of those pellet smokers than on any of the other kinds of smokers 500 to 1500 my recommendation is going to be in two parts if you like playing with the fire you like staying out there and babysitting it and you want to invest a ton of time into barbecue get an off set my recommendation would be the old country barbecue pits Brazos it's you know a thousand dollars and it's just a great little pit I love mine I'm gonna keep that thing forever if you don't want to do that my recommendation would be to get a larger pellet grill pellet grills are just so in credibly convenient that to me somewhere in between you know it might make sense for you if you want to be somewhat involved but not super involved but that's where I would steer most people to because the people who are going to be somewhat involved if you really love barbecue you love the process eventually you're gonna want to have complete control over everything you know like an offset if you just want barbecue and you don't want to have to do a bunch of fiddling with stuff and playing with a fire and you know torture yourself get a pellet smoker and there are decent pellet smokers in that price range and finally the $1500 and above if you have a major capacity need I would say get a large offset if you want to produce the absolute best tasting smoke flavor possible on your meat get a large offset if you want to have something that's just really really nice and you can rely on it and you don't have to mess with it I would say get a high quality pellet smoker I love the pits and spits maverick 12:50 you know there are other great Pelt smokers out there particularly the Yoder appellate smokers are are really good I have messed around with him before I really like them I don't like them as much as the pits and spits but something that's well made and is gonna last a long time is what you want to invest that kind of money in so if somebody comes to me and says I have a budget of $1,000 for a smoker what should I get I'd say Old Country Brazos unless you don't wanna manage the fire then get a pellet smoker that's the bottom line of how most of these recommendations go thank you for watching mad scientist BBQ if you enjoyed the video hit the like button and also subscribe to the channel and make sure to hit that notification valve so you get notified whenever I put out new BBQ content also you can follow me on Instagram and Twitter at mad scientist BBQ I'll see you guys next time you can do a ton of things with other weber okay also you can actually add something like a barbecue okay also you can add something like a barbecue cue everyone say guru okay also you can add something like a barbecue bar oh my goodness barbeque guru if you're using it for a low in smoke with why I said low in smoke in sub-zero temperatures and still steer safe [Music]
