Certain models double as smokers or have integrated thermometers. Others have side tables or are designed to be especially easy to clean. It’s your grill and your food, so decide what’s most important to you. Grilling cooks food quickly using high heat, while smoking uses indirect heat and lower temperatures to cook food slowly.
Because of this, the Napoleon is definitely not a grill for charcoal beginners. The true original Weber grill, the Weber Original Kettle Grill, can be purchased for under $100, making it our top pick for best weber charcoal grill 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.
The integrated water reservoir holds a quart of water and provides a humid cooking environment. The Napoleon Freestanding Charcoal Kettle Grill took the longest to set up, clocking in at an hour and five minutes of build time. 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.
Based on our conversations with Joe Salvaggio of Big Apple BBQ and the many manufacturers at the Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Expo, we eliminated kamados and pellet griller-smokers for this guide. Those designs offer attractive versatility, but they’re also expensive—$350 at minimum, and the most popular and best-regarded styles run twice that or more. And Salvaggio noted that wood pellets simply don’t produce the searing heat you need to make perfect burgers or steaks. 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 provide heating oil at fair prices to the entire Lehigh Valley.
The worst was our Tacklife review unit, which didn’t hold much heat and didn’t sear while cooking. The steak on that grill needed an additional five minutes to get to a temperature of 135 F, the minimum for medium rare. 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 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.
Charcoal grills also tend to be less expensive than gas or pellet grills, so you can cook outdoors, even if you’re on a budget. It’s a three-probe temperature tracker and ventilation control system portable bbq that feeds all the grilling data you could want to your phone. If your fire is gaining too much heat on a low-and-slow pork shoulder, the Tempmaster will cut back airflow to cut the heat down.