In 2004 the family decided to create a home heating oil division to help offset the stagnant winter sales of outdoor products. They began to weber charcoal grill provide heating oil at fair prices to the entire Lehigh Valley. Throw your hands up for the love of charcoal and ridiculously good food.
There’s nothing quite like the simple pleasure of cooking over charcoal on a nice grill like this. If you’ve never cooked with charcoal before, the Original Kettle is an excellent grill for discovering this style of barbecue. When it comes to cleaning the lid and bowl, burning charcoal and cooking food will cause carbon to accumulate on them. This is normal, and if you’ve used charcoal before, you’ve seen it; it looks like peeling paint.
However, it takes longer to heat up and is a different cooking experience from traditional charcoal grills. During our tests, we were only able to get our hamburgers to cook to rare, and our chicken did not sear and crisp up as well as it did on all the other grills. Because of this, the Napoleon is definitely not a grill for charcoal beginners.
Finally, after all our tests were done, we did routine maintenance, emptying the ash catchers, brushing the grates, and washing out the grills. Over the course of two days, we put three charcoal grills through a battery of tests. On balance, gas is probably the better choice if you favor no-fuss cooking or grill often (and especially if you grill on weeknights, when time is at a premium). If you’re an occasional griller or you enjoy getting hands-on with your cooking, charcoal is an economical choice that, with a bit of practice, produces superb results.
As you might know, starting a charcoal grill usually begins with simply getting the coals warmed up in a chimney starter. It comes with an auto-start gas ignition that consistently lit the coals for us. You can place the lid in different positions for the best top damper placement, with the bottom damper easy to adjust when your flame gets too hot. During our smoking test, we were able to keep the grill within a range of 10 degrees for several hours, making this a great option for cooking with indirect heat.
Light the charcoal with a Rapidfire® Chimney Starter, watch as the coals transform into a glowing heat source, practice controlling the temperature, and enjoy the process as the food cooks. This is pure meditation after a busy week – and precisely what the charcoal grill provides. The original PK kettle grill hit the market the same year that the Weber did, and it is among the most efficient and durable small charcoal grills we’ve tested to date. The new (and we’ll definitely say improved) PK300 comes with an impressive 20-year warranty. We love this grill, and it always appears highly in our roundup of the best charcoal grills available. Although it’s not a purpose-built smoker, it is certainly possible to do some smoking on your charcoal grill with the help of the charcoal snake method and some good temp control via the vents.