We filled it up to the top with briquettes and then put newspaper underneath, which we lit on fire and then allowed the coals to heat up for exactly 15 minutes. Once your briquettes are fired up and ready to go, you then dump them into the base of the kettle grill. After you pop the cooking grate over the red-hot briquettes, you’re ready to start cooking. Over the course of two days, we put three charcoal grills through a battery of tests designed to demonstrate their qualities and highlight their differences. We cooked burgers on high heat to see how well the grills seared meat and how even and intense a heat they could generate across the whole grate surface.
The main difference between the standard and more premium models is a home for the lid; the premium model (about $10 more expensive) has a hinge that holds the lid when not in use. For more grill content, check out our guides to the best charcoal grills, pellet grills and gas grills. You can create an indirect heat zone by placing briquettes, or lump charcoal if you prefer, only on one side of the charcoal grate. You leave the other side empty then cook food above the cool spot. The trouble is that it’s tricky to control the grill’s heat level this way. It’s harder to do that with a Weber Kettle, at least without lots of practice.
The Weber Kettle does have a built-in thermometer, but I always recommend just getting your own to ensure maximum accuracy and reliability for temperature reading. Shop your favorite products and we’ll find the best deal with a single click. Ribs cooked on the Napoleon grill came out tasty, though with weber charcoal grill bark that was a little dry. If the ash catcher is even slightly warm, the ash inside is still a fire hazard. Indirect grilling can produce a great roasted chicken—the Weber’s is a textbook example. Authentically grilled food shows no boundaries with the all-new Lumin electric grill from Weber.
That said, this Weber takes under 10 minutes to set up and requires no hardware. Like the Weber Original Premium grill, hamburgers tested on this grill cooked up to a perfect medium rare. The chicken we grilled took four minutes of sear time and 25 additional minutes on indirect heat to come up to a safe internal temperature. If you’re looking for the best affordable charcoal grill under $100 that will cook your meat to a perfect temperature, then this Weber is for you.
For the indirect-cooking test, we cooked a whole chicken at as close to 500 °F as we could get (emulating Barbara Kafka’s famous oven-roasting method). We moved the remaining coals to one side of the coal grate and added half a chimney’s worth of freshly lit coals. In effect we were testing whether the grills could function as ovens—a really nice feature in the hot summer months, when you may not want to warm up your kitchen. Because of its dominance, the Weber kettle has spawned a lot of copycats.
The charcoal briquettes form a line two coals wide and two coals deep. On cart-style grills, we modify the snake to run in right angles to match their rectangular-shaped fireboxes. Next, we tested each grill’s medium heat cooking capability by roasting whole chickens. The trick here is to keep the grills at a hot enough temperature to cook a chicken for upwards of two hours. We measured charcoal in a chimney by grams, and in a ratio for that grill’s specific surface area.
Charcoal briquettes and lump charcoal are easier to ignite and keep lit than ordinary firewood. And if you plan to cook low and slow we suggest adding a few chunks of hardwood to your charcoal weber q pile. This brings about more smoke flavor in barbecue meat like pork ribs, pork butt and beef brisket. Next, we light each grill’s snake at one end of the chain with five lit briquettes .
All of our tests were designed and run by Wirecutter senior writer Lesley Stockton, who has over a decade of experience in professional kitchens, many of them spent on the grill station. Lesley conducted the testing with senior staff writer Tim Heffernan, who wrote this guide, and Michael Sullivan, a senior writer on the kitchen team. Sam Sifton, assistant managing editor at The New York Times, also joined in and added his extensive knowledge. The Weber Original Kettle Premium Charcoal Grill 22″ is a classic for good reason. Plus, you can get it in a few different color and size combinations.
Just like a lot of modern charcoal grills, it has an ashtray to help speed up cleaning. It’s big enough to take on quite a lot, so you shouldn’t have to empty it too frequently. What really sets the Kettle apart from the rest through is its vents. Also called dampers, these vents sit both at the bottom and the top of the grill chamber.