Review of Brinkmann Smoke 'N Grill Smoker

Double-Grill Charcoal
-Post also on AC

Recently a relative of mine was ranting and raving about how wonderful his smoker was. How it slow smoked a ham to a delightful flavor unlike anything he had ever had before.

I was intrigued, even more so when he told me he got a smoker on sale at Walmart for only $20.00. After taking a look at this legendary smoker of his, and liking the appearance of it, and the rave review about it, I had to have one.

Unfortunately when we went to buy our smoker, the lowest price we could find on a smoker was the Brinkmann Smoke 'N Grill, which was priced at close to $40.00. We wanted it though; we had plans to smoke a small 8 pound turkey to test it out before Thanksgiving. This should not be an issue though because the Brinkmann Smoke 'N Grill is said to hold up to 50 pounds of food!

The Brinkmann Smoke 'N Grill unfortunately did not come with the legs in the box. We had to drive back to Walmart to return it for another one. The second Brinkmann Smoke 'N Grill came dented, so we had to find yet another one. At this point my heart was feeling pretty heavy. I had a hunch that the smoker was going to suck, considering how many times we had to exchange it.

After finally obtaining a full Brinkmann Smoke 'N Grill, with all of the parts it took my boyfriend about 45 minutes to fully set the smoker up.

Inside it had 2 racks for placing food on, a charcoal bowl, and a water bowl. There is also a small hatch door that you can open to add water, and charcoal or wood chips as you are smoking your food.

We added different spices to our water to give it some flavoring, and we added some hickory flavored pre-soaked wood chips, and charcoal to the Brinkmann Smoke 'N Grill.

The first annoyance was the non-stop adding of charcoal. We luckily thought ahead and bought an 18 pound bag of charcoal. The instructions said we would only need 9 pounds of charcoal, but that was not the case. We consistently had to add coals to the smoker in order to keep the fire going.

Later on we discovered that we could have used oak wood for longer burning, and a higher heat setting.

As it was though it took forever for the turkey to fully smoke. We placed the 8 pound turkey in at around 5pm, and it was not fully done till 11:30pm. All in all about 7 hours of smoking.

The corn which we smoked came out relatively good, but honestly it was nothing worth raving about. The same goes for the turkey. It was good, but lost its entire turkey flavoring, and had an overpowering hickory smoked flavoring to it. The meat however was fantastic and very tender.

All in all the Brinkmann Smoke 'N Grill works, it just takes a really, really long time to do the job. I would definitely recommend it though because it was cheaper than the rest, and worked as described. If you do decide to buy it, I recommend you buy a lot of charcoal, because a small 9 pound bag will not cut it especially if you are smoking something more than 4 pounds in weight.