After your done grilling , you should always empty your ash tray. On our favorite Weber grill, this is located right below the grill and even has a handle for ease of use. For this review, I focused on the top-rated Gold and Platinum Medal winning models from the weber q AmazingRibs.com database of almost 600 searchable equipment reviews. The list below spans a range of features and prices, including both newer models and well-established leaders in the field. I also consider look, feel, functionality, durability, and price.
You could readily cook half-a-dozen steaks at once or enough burgers to feed a baseball team, including the relief pitchers. Up top, you’ll find a single vent offset from the center weber genesis 2 of the lid to help you control the out-flow of smoke. Right at the peak of the dome is a nylon handle with a heat shield to keep you from burning yourself when you lift the lid.
Depending on the season and how your charcoal grill is set up, your experience cooking and grilling will likely be very different from ours. For example, a kettle-style charcoal grill left in the July sun all day will run a lot hotter than it will in the cooler spring months. We tested the 22-inch in black, but Weber also offers an 18-inch version of its original kettle design. There are certainly fancier and more expensive grills to use for cooking, but for a balance of affordability and quality, you can’t go wrong with this classic. In cooking performance, the Weber was the best and most hassle-free grill in our tests. 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).
The Cuisinart Black Kettle Grill is one of the smallest we tested with its 18-inch kettle. It’s similar in size to the Weber Original Kettle Charcoal Grill, though unlike that grill, it comes with an ash pan and a thermometer. However, a major downside to this grill was that the built-in thermometer barely worked.
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 weber q looking for the best affordable charcoal grill under $100 that will cook your meat to a perfect temperature, then this Weber is for you. Under the lid it looks more like a gas grill than a charcoal grill thanks to 549 square inches of porcelain-coated cast-iron grates plus a secondary steel rack for warming or indirect cooking.