Pit Barrel Jr. Unboxing, Testing, & Review [JR. VS SR.]

all right taking Cordero here at top geek over at smoking meet geeks and what we're going to do today is take a look at the pit barrel versus the pit barrel jr. right now there's been a lot of questions as to the difference between these two the one thing right off the bat that stands out is the hundred dollars so the pit barrel jr. comes in at 249 the standard pit barrel is going to be 349 so what we want to do is kind of just run it through and see how the cook process differs between the two see the size dimensions and I'll just kind of give you a quick rundown on the dimensions right now we're looking at 36 inches tall for the standard pit barrel the pit barrel jr. is 33 inches tall so not a huge difference there when it comes to how wide they are you're looking at about a three inch difference between the junior and the standard the junior comes in at 21 inches wide while your standard pit barrel is going to be 25 inches wide so those are some of the biggest differences right off the bat the rest were actually going to go through and kind of you know as we're smoking the meat as we're putting it on as we're pulling it out you'll be able to get some differences we're also going to unbox it in just a second and then lay out all the parts so you can kind of compare apples to apples and figure out for you you know if the hundred bucks is something that you should you know spend on or if just you know for the family or if you like to do a lot of those outdoor outings that the pit barrel junior might just be right for you [Music] okay so on the left side we're gonna have the pit Barrow jr. laid out for you here and then on the right side we've got the standard pit barrel cooker so let's just going to go through the jr. real quick you can see the difference here in the baskets as far as the size height wise there's also a difference so you can see here got a little bit of a difference on height but mainly it's just how wide each one is so obviously you won't be able to hold as much charcoal in the jr. and so what we really want to see is does that make a difference as far as you know how much cook time does the jr. have compared to the standard pit barrel and then how how does heat also look as well so our stands are roughly the same - of course the width on those so you can see those two in comparison here let's just show the lids real quick just really get an eyeball for size on the two of these ok so then here we've got the pit barrel jr. lid and then your standard pit barrel lid so a significant difference there as far as the rods that are gonna go through they're obviously the ones for the pit barrel standard pit girl it's gonna be a little longer here right and so that just kind of makes sense as the other ones wider and then so in the boxes we've got our our attachment for the lid here's the attachment here and then the standard pit barrel is gonna come with eight hooks while your jr. is going to come with four okay so let's take a look and then of course they do include you know some of their standard rubs to give a give a try out for those and of course your instruction manuals and a cool sticker so that's pretty cool so let's go and take a look at the pit barrels side-by-side that way you can get a quick you know above view shot of them to compare the two okay so we've got our standard pit barrel here obviously and then the here so you can see the size difference just to kind of compare alright we're back here from the pit barrel cook all day about eight hours on our cook we went ahead and put both of these pork butts on and just pulled them off and they just look absolutely delicious this this here on the left on my left is the when we put on the regular-sized pit barrel cooker and then here we have the one that we put on the junior we basically took a pork butt cut it in half and for the sake of also timing just kind of threw both of these bad boys on and so you can see that the pit barrel cooker always does a good job at yielding that really nice bark and looks pretty good yeah it looks great I'm looking forward to this for about eight hours now right yeah so you use the pit barrel a lot before yeah we've used it it's actually our top pick for our best smoker under 500 bucks so we actually never took a look at the junior until today we've always used the regular standard sized pit barrel it's pretty much automatic I mean you put it in there and you can literally come back ten hours later and it basically does the same thing throughout the entire time so that was one of the reasons we liked it the most for not only a beginner but for the price point in something that you can kind of just set and forget without any kind of you know fans or any other controllers maintains that temperature just like you want yes to run around 265 but I don't I don't mind that I like I like that temperature yeah I didn't even touch it for from the minute the lid went on right yeah for the pit barrel standard cooker we put it in there about three o'clock and pulled it off about eight hours later we never opened the lid once never checked anything you can see that the temperature on the graph there shows that it maintained a consistent temperature throughout that entire cook process so it's definitely what you're looking for okay now how about the pit barrel jr. what's the difference between the regular and the junior sighs oh man that looks great so on the regular pit barrel you're looking at about a 50 pound barrel versus the junior where you're around 30 pounds so what was it like actually loading the coals and the pork into the pit barrel Junior yeah so after using the standard pit barrel for so long you get used to that size and so when we went to load it up we found that on the pit barrel Junior the space that you have obviously is you know 18 to 14 you know like in the diameter we're looking at that difference there so I think at the juniors 21 inches wide the pit barrel is 25 inches wide so that's a pretty good size difference when you're actually trying to get into the barrel so on the pit barrel Junior it was a little tighter getting around the rods and then especially when it went to like actually pulling it off you know you have to practically cradle the meat with one hand and then pull one of the rods out as you lift it up it's not as easy to as on the standard pit barrel where you can basically grab the meat and pull it right out yeah you know you're definitely gonna notice that difference in size there when you put it on yeah so that was kinda that was awkward going in not dining too much so we pulled one of the cold rods out because the fire wasn't barely going right but getting them getting the hot rod out of there was a bit of an adventure ball not dropping the pork right sound a little tough so how'd things start off you we get the we get the pork um we get the pork on the fire what happened next yeah so I think that's one of the big differences with Beryl jr. is that basically any small little things that you do to it effect the temperature practically about 50 to 60 percent almost double what they would be in the pit barrel so let me explain on the pit barrel for example if you notice that you're running a little low in temperature and you want to kick things up a notch you basically crack the lid for just you know four or five minutes and it's basically gonna jump you know five to ten degrees within that within the within that window now with the pit barrel of junior if you do something similar to that you're gonna get that same effect in about half the time hmm so you know that was one of the things that we definitely notice and I think when we put on the medes we loaded up the pit barrel first and then went to load up the junior that's why they had to start on the charcoal exactly so by the time we had loaded the charcoal in and the lid was off and we went to go put the meat in well it was probably exposed to the full oxygen for maybe about two minutes a minute and a half longer which was just long enough to keep that thing up to right around 300 degrees within the first 15 minutes first 20 minutes of the cook while the the senior pit barrel or the standard pit barrel basically you know did its thing climbed up from you know 200 to 225 you know and eventually got up to right around where it likes to be around that 250 range um so the thing with that is you know I think we've burned through quite a bit of the coal that we really weren't supposed to ignite and get agitated and get going right early on so you can see on the graph the pit barrel Junior had that real big start out the gate right around you know running around 300 within an hour so that seemed to caused a few problems as we got them to the stall area where it needed that extra gas to kind of get through there it almost seemed like the coals didn't have enough juice to really kind of power through that stall as well as the standard pit barrel so I feel like we definitely need to make sure that you know we in the future using the pit barrel junior that we stick more to the to the script you know how how you load it up gonna be on the really tight timeline there yeah for sure now - we were able to we were able to get the temperature down into the sort of normal smoking range right yeah eventually it got to where it needed to be probably about after the hour and a half but we had to adjust the vent so we wanted to basically get it from where it was around 320 degrees and get it back down to that comfortable to 50 to 60 range so we decided to close the vent here in Arizona we're at about 1200 feet so that's about a quarter of the way open so we ended up closing it pretty much all the way and then that in about about a half-hour after we closed it it started to drop we're really wanted to see that temperature out okay so once we get once we actually got into the good cooking zone how did things roll what did you have what did you have to do to the Hit Girl Junior yeah at one point it just seemed like with the pit barrel Junior like I said that stall area it just kind of got stuck there normally your stall I'm gonna stick for a two to three hours you can stay at that you know that 2/5 or that 150 range but it just seemed a little too long what we noticed is that eventually the pit barrel Junior looked like it was you know the fat and the drippings from the meat were kind of extinguishing the coals hmm and so right about two hours before the end of the cook we lifted up the lid to kind of check on it and we noticed that there was probably a handful of coals left that hadn't been burned but they weren't going very well so the rest had already been burnt top and then as some were sitting kind of in the corner so we basically ended up just loading up you know maybe another 10 or 11 you know brick briquettes in there and then dropped the lid on and then finished the cook and it actually caught up right to the neck and neck with the senior pit barrel right towards the end so it actually covered probably a good 30 degrees of internal meat temperature in the same time that the senior pit barrel did about 15 20 so yeah so it it had worked its way for the stall was just our fire management wasn't quite there yeah exactly so who was building up the energy that it needed for heat so as soon as you know it got back to its 230 and then jumped back up to like right around 280 I believe it was it brought it right out of the you know right out into the final lap of its cook so yeah I was surprised they've all finished right at the same time and you can see our products are fairly similar but you know I think there's a lot of benefits you know to both obviously price point you know is one however it kind of comes down to the way that you cooked and the way you know like you're planning on in you're intent on using this I think that's a big deciding factor on which one of the two you really want to go with okay what is your overall opinion of the pit barrel jr. is it something is this home you might like to have around yeah so I think like the pit barrel juniors definitely got its strengths I prefer myself the standard pit barrel just because I like to you know like I like to entertain I like to be able to cook for a party you know whatever it might be and even if I take it out like on on the move typically I'm taking it out to go you know hang out with other people and that kind of thing so for me I think my style fits you know the standard pit barrel right now I could see a lot of reasons why somebody may want the junior you know obviously the obvious reason it's about 20 pounds lighter right yeah I could see that being a problem yeah so I mean you've got to empty this thing and it's got ashes right so you're gonna need to be able to basically deadlift that thing flip it over and dump it out and so if you know 50 pounds doesn't sound like something that you want to be picking up yeah right we're not talking about a 50 yelling you know drum here but I mean that's not nothing right where do you see yourself using that good girl junior yeah I feel like there's a lot of places where like let's say for example you do tailgating or you go camping we talked a little bit about that I mean if you're going camping and you want something that's self-sustaining the pit barrel all the way around is you know a great deal it works on its own you can load everything up inside the barrel you know your charcoal everything you're gonna need throw in the back of the truck and you know when you show up it's not like you really need a whole lot to run this thing for eight to ten hours yeah so that's one of the things that I really liked about the pit barrel initially so I feel like those are some good areas for it and so if you plan on moving it around you know the pit barrel junior may be something to consider I think like ultimately it comes down to like volume of how much you can hook right now so like do you want to try to cook you know more than one pork butt right so that's where like the limit would be like you're not gonna put more than one pork butt in a pit barrel Junior right no like putting one pork butt in there was a bit of an adventure right and I can practically I can get two pork butts in the standard pit barrel yeah you know what I'm saying so I mean you could probably fit two turkeys in in a standard one like maybe you know regular-sized turkeys and so that's definitely something to consider you know if you plan on doing that because it's nice if you're gonna do something for ten hours I'd like to be able to yield right maximum even if it's just you know like to set it you know like maybe for another day or something like that you know that's definitely the way to go especially for your 10 hours of labor that you put in sure how about the value do you think do you think the difference of a hundred dollars is significant here hundred bucks is a lot of pork yeah I think there's value to be had in saving the hundred bucks if you don't plan on cooking large amounts of food right because it's easier to move it's easier to work with you know it's kind of one of those things where again it comes down to like what's your preference and what's your style for me I'm gonna spend the extra hundred bucks my only concern is just you know the amount of volume that you're looking at and you got a baby in a little bit more right so yeah this is definitely something you can set and forget but you can make make less mistakes with the pig Jr then you can with the senior the senior gives a little bit more room margin for error kind of more kind of more the big truck instead of the sports car yeah exactly so pit barrel jr. is a family-owned and operated there out of Kentucky Louisville Kentucky yeah and military owned and operated as well so and you basically have to go to their website to purchase they don't sell on Amazon so if you're looking to grab the pit barrel or the pit barrel jr. you'll need to go directly to their website to grab it and if you actually click the link in the bottom of the video they end up giving us a kickback credit for you having made the purchase which is how we do a lot of these different reviews and videos all right so but yeah all in all pit barrel jr. 249 comes in at about 60% smaller I think we did get half on it you know buy the same height same height about 60% less area yeah and then the pit barrel standard or senior as I like to call it yeah 349 and they do actually offer financing on their on their website so a lot of people don't know that which I didn't even really know that till not too long ago I got on there and saw that so they have financing options on there so for the price I mean you're gonna end up with probably one of the best smokers that you can buy that's gonna rival smokers that you're gonna end up you know you can drop you know $1500 on the smoker that is really the bottom line right is I didn't have to check on it I didn't have to open the lid and here's my final product right so yeah you know if you can do that and get away with it for under you know $400 $300 that's that's a pretty darn good deal all right so the pit barrel smoker our best smoker under $500 pit barrel Jun pit barrel jr. may be our second-best smoker under $500 for smoking meat geeks I'm Nate this is Jacob I like and subscribe and keep watching us for more videos here all right awesome we're gonna dig in let's do it yes and some cool music cleaning about [Music] everything there's gonna be some really stupid moments hmm I think I showed us that twice

Channel: Smoking Meat Geeks #MeatGeeks

Views: 3,386

Rating: 4.4814816 out of 5

Keywords: pit barrel jr, review, smoker, pit barrel jr vs pit barrel, unboxing, testing, smoking pork butt, pit barrel cooker co

Id: k2qm7tpw79A

Length: 18min 37sec (1117 seconds)

Published: Sun May 17 2020