re: HELP me choose a Smoker

Another advantage of the pellet is this: the best smoker is the one you're going to use. With a good pellet smoker, you literally walk outside, press the temp you want, wait 5 minutes for it to get up to temp, and that thing will produce that temp for as long as you want. No refilling wood, no checking on it, nada. 24 hours of pure pecan blue smoke if you want.


I hear the smokey taste is not as strong as wood burning offsets, but if there's a difference then it's a slight one. You'd never be able to tell.


So here's another way of looking at it: if you want your smoker for weekend warrior type stuff and want a significant learning curve and also have to tend to your smoker the whole damn time to regulate the temp, then a traditional offset might be for you. OR you can get basically the exact same taste by pushing a button. Not to mention that you now get to use your smoker monday through Friday during/after work.



One last point: learning how to operate your equipment is only half the battle. You still have to learn what you're doing re: the actual meat part. You'll be fighting your offset smoker for months or a year before you finally get it down and then you've barely started learning what to look for with the meat. And by that time you probably stopped smoking shite 5 months ago bc you got tired of wasting an entire cook on sub par food.

Do yourself a favor, get a pellet. Now that I've said all this, i think I'm firing up the Rec Tec tonight for some burgers

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I hear the smokey taste is not as strong as wood burning offsets, but if there's a difference then it's a slight one. You'd never be able to tell.

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Someone that knows how to use their stick burner will get a much better piece of meat using same recipe vs a pellet. It's noticeable.

You are right though, if it's easy, you are way more likely to use it far more often than manning a stick burner. That's why I don't use a stick burner anymore. Didn't want to spend the time with it anymore, wanted something with ease of use.

I have both the 22-1/2" WSM and a Backwoods Chubby G2 and I love both of them. The Backwoods I now use a lot more than the WSM both are very fine water smokers.

The WSM I paid $ 399.00
The Backwoods I paid $ 1495.00

If money is not an option I would highly recommend you check out Texas Pitmakers look at the vaults, 48"hitman, or long sniper with the insulated fire box.

Kalamazoo makes a very custom SS gas grill that you can also load charcoal or wood logs to cook over and smoke on but it is very expensive.

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Do you have trouble getting a smoke ring with your pellet smoker?

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Not even a little bit

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I'd still recommend a pellet smoker for several years before even thinking about going offset.

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Opposite of how I did it. Big offset first...now own a pellet...actually, I have 4 pits but thats a story for another day.

To the op...everybody has pretty much given you all the pro's and con's but I haven't seen my brand of pellet smoker mentioned. Check out Green Mountain Grills. I got the biggest, baddest one they make for Christmas this past year and it's phenomenal. I've been smoking/grilling on my other pits for years now and the FIRST TIME I did chicken on the pellet, it was the best chicken I'd ever done.

The ONLY drawback I've found is when I put a piece of meat on the pellet, I need to let that meat smoke at app. 200deg for the first hour to get the amount of smoke I want into the meat. So it takes a touch longer but it doesn't bother me. And the model I have has wifi so if you wanted to, you could put the meat on and insert the probe then monitor it all from your recliner on your cell. The app shows you internal temp on the meat (when the probe is in) and grill temp.

Raise/lower the temp of your grill from your living room if you want. Then you can set profiles in the app for each piece of meat. Once you've pretty much got your favorite rib recipe and technique figured out on the pellet, just create the profile in the app. Next time you cook ribs, pull up that profile, hit start and the pit takes off. You just have to throw the ribs on when the pit temp is right.

GMG Jim Bowie Model