The Best Charcoal Grill to Buy in 2022: Tested and Reviewed

There’s nothing quite like the smell and taste of a charcoal grill in the summer. Charcoal grilling takes a bit more time and attention to get things just right, so when you choose to use a charcoal grill for a barbecue, everyone knows you mean business. The oval shape of the grill made it easy to cook multiple types of food, from skewers to roasted corn.

Upon extinguishing the coal and allowing the grill to cool down, you canclean the gratesusing a scraper or wire grill brush. If needed, you can take the grates off and soak them in soapy water for a few hours to loosen up burnt-on food and grease. Once they’re clean, make sure to oil them using a rag or paper towel to prevent rust. After cooking, the best way to put out hot coals is to close the lid and shut both the upper and lower vents to cut off the oxygen supply. Closing the lid and vents will extinguish the coals, but it may take a while for the coals to cool down. She’s an expert on all things home, including kitchen appliances, grills, and other cooking gadgets.

This model has a wide variety of useful features that any grill master would love, including things like a Touch-N-Go gas ignition system and work table for food prep. We rarely recommend products we haven’t tested and we never recommend products that we don’t love. Often, but not always, if you purchase a product after clicking a link on our site we get a finder’s fee. These fees do not add to the price of purchase but they do help keep this site alive. Built around SnS Grill’s patented Slow ‘N Sear charcoal kettle accessory, this 22-inch kamado is a premium ceramic grill that brings true 2-zone cooking to a kamado.

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weber charcoal grill

The true original Weber grill, the Weber Original Kettle Grill, can be purchased for under $100, making it our top pick for best budget grill. This grill measures 18 inches wide, which is a noticeable surface-area difference from the 22-inch grill. It does not include a lid hook or thermometer, and the ash catcher is not enclosed.

Another option is to use an electric charcoal lighter, which you put on the grill along with charcoal to bring the coals up to temperature. LaTonya Michelle Darrisaw has over a decade of experience fact-checking, writing, and editing food-related content, as well as sourcing and recommending the best products for the home and in entertainment. Introduce big, bold flavor to your BBQ and grilling creations thanks to the weber charcoal grill Meathead’s Amazing line of pork, red meat, and poultry rubs as well as a KC-style BBQ sauce. 3) Tell us everything we need to know to help such as the type of cooker and thermometer. Dial thermometers are often off by as much as 50°F so if you are not using a good digital thermometer we probably can’t help you with time and temp questions. Our most important source of sustenance is people who join our Pitmaster Club.

While this grill does come with an included cart, which added to setup time, we also found the instructions hard to follow, and the amount of hardware included felt a bit overwhelming. If you’re going to purchase this grill, then we’d advise looking into having your local hardware store build and deliver it to you. We measured the temperature weber q of the grill surface, as well as the internal temperature of the chicken, with an external thermometer to ensure that any built-in temperate gauges were accurate. For the most part, the built-in thermometers were accurate, with the exception of the Cuisinart gauge, which barely registered any temperature throughout our testing process.