The Best Charcoal Grill

All of our tests were designed and ran by Wirecutter senior staff 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, one of the original writers of this guide, and Michael Sullivan, a senior staff writer on the kitchen team. Sam Sifton, founding editor of New York Times Cooking, joined us for testing.

We also spoke with more than a dozen experts, backing up our reporting with comprehensive research and hands-on time with the grills.

We knew the classic Weber kettle would be the centerpiece of our testing; it’s durable, it’s versatile, and it’s dominated the charcoal-grilling field for decades. It’s also spawned plenty of copycats, most of them cheap knockoffs that aren’t worth the minor savings.

We looked for a kettle that could compete with the Weber model on performance, price, and value, landing on the Napoleon Rodeo Charcoal Kettle Grill, an earlier version of the current Napoleon 22″ Charcoal Kettle Grill.  We also decided to test the popular PK Grill & Smoker, acknowledging that high-quality charcoal grills of different designs may have advantages that kettle grills don’t.

We didn’t spend much time fretting over materials: Kettles are generally made of thin carbon steel coated with porcelain, which can last a plenty long time. The PK Grill has a cast-aluminum body, much like the gas grills we recommend. And though grates come in a range of materials, our test models all happened to use thin wire grates, and they all performed well, with no sticking.

We also compared how each of these grills performed in our grilling tests and evaluated other parts of the user experience, such as vent control and assembly.

Unless it was not an option (like with the PK Grill model), we opted to test versions of these grills without built-in carts or side tables. They can add unnecessary bulk and cost to a type of grill often chosen for being compact and cost-efficient.

We eliminated kamados and pellet griller-smokers for this guide. Those designs offer attractive versatility, but they’re also expensive, and kamados especially have difficult learning curves. And Joe Salvaggio of Big Apple BBQ noted that wood pellets simply don’t produce the searing heat you need to make perfect burgers or steaks.

We put three charcoal grills through a battery of cooking tasks:

The burger test: To start, we lit a chimney’s worth of briquets, then poured the lit coals into the grills and spread them in an even layer. We heated the grills with the lids down and all vents fully open for 15 minutes (a standard manufacturer’s recommendation). We then oiled the grates and distributed 6-ounce patties across the entire cooking surface of each grill, being careful not to crowd. We kept an eye out for undesirable flare-ups and examined the evenness of cooking on the different areas of the grates.

The low-and-slow chicken test: We let the same batch of coals burn down to the white-ash stage with the lid open, which took about 20 minutes. We then re-oiled the grates and distributed a whole cut-up chicken—two each of breasts, thighs, drumsticks, and wings—skin side down. We then closed the lids for 45 minutes, occasionally checking for charring and redistributing the pieces as necessary.

We monitored the grills’ temperatures using the built-in thermometer where available and a probe thermometer where not, and adjusted the vents as necessary. After 45 minutes, we flipped the chicken parts and applied barbecue sauce every five minutes until the cook time reached an hour flat. Then we had a taste, paying special attention to moisture in the breast meat.

The whole-chicken test: To test each grill’s indirect cooking capabilities, we moved the remaining coals to one side of the coal grate and added half a chimney’s worth of freshly lit coals to each grill. We then stoked the temperature inside the grills to as close to 500 °F as possible (to emulate Barbara Kafka’s famous oven-roasting method). We placed a 3- to 4-pound chicken in each grill as far from the coals as we could and put the lid on, with the vent directly above the chicken to draw smoke and hot air around the bird. At the end of each hour-long test, we noted the depth and evenness of browning and tasted the chicken.

Throughout, we also tested accessories such as spatulas, tongs, grill brushes, and sheet pans, and picked our favorites. Doing so also helped us identify a few design strengths and flaws of the grills.

When we assembled the grills, we looked out for unclear instructions, missing parts, or dangerously sharp edges.

Finally, after all our tests were done, we did routine maintenance—emptying the ash catchers, brushing the grates, and washing out the grills.

The Weber Original Kettle Premium Charcoal Grill 22″ is a classic for good reason. In our tests it outperformed the other grills in cooking, ease of assembly, and user-friendly details. None of the other models performed consistently great on everything the way the Weber kettle did.

Its construction is simple and solid. The materials—rustproof aluminum legs, porcelain-coated steel for the body, and a nickel-plated steel grill—are designed to last. And we appreciated details like convenient tool hooks on the side handles. Add to that its solid warranty and well-regarded customer service, and it’s hard to see a better value.

It offered the best, most hassle-free cooking performance. The Weber grill produced an excellent high-heat sear on a dozen hamburgers; crisped the skin of our barbecue chicken over the course of a long, low-heat cook; and delivered a deeply browned, well-cooked whole chicken via indirect cooking. All of this required minimal fussing on our part.

The Weber Original Kettle Premium Charcoal Grill’s design makes controlling the heat simple. You open and close the lower vents with a long handle mounted above the ash box. The handle slides easily and stays cool to the touch—no need to put on gloves or use a towel.

Up top, the Weber model’s lid vent is a simple disc of aluminum; you just flick it left or right to open or close the vent holes. Unlike the lower vents, this gets hot, so make sure to use a spatula or your tongs.

The Weber grill comes with an integrated thermometer. This is useful for getting your charcoal grill up to your desired cooking temperature, but keep in mind that charcoal burns faster or slower depending on wind and vent conditions, so these grills will have hotter and cooler spots. Bottom line: Keep an eye on how fast things are cooking and adjust accordingly.

The Weber kettle is round, so you can spin the grate to adjust heat exposure. Without having to move your food around, you can expose burgers, chicken, or whatever else you’re cooking to higher or lower heat. In contrast, rectangular grates (like those on the PK Grill) can’t spin around; you have to move the food or the coals to adjust the cooking.

Hinged sections on opposite sides of the grate let you access the entire charcoal bed below. The Napoleon grill we tested had hinges on opposite sides of the grate, too. But the PK Grill had a hinge on only one side, which proved inconvenient. All the grills we tested featured simple, thin-wire grates that worked well, with no notable sticking.

The Weber grill’s assembly is simple and clear. The legs and ash catcher slot effortlessly into built-in sockets and lock into place with idiot-proof spring pins—not a bolt or screw in sight. Weber even supplies a simple plastic tool to help you attach the thermometer without digging out a wrench.

All you need is a Phillips screwdriver to attach the side handles, and a hammer (or even just a chunk of firewood) to tap the end caps of the wheel axle into place. One person can have the grill up and running within minutes of opening the box. By contrast, other grills we tested had cumbersome assembly processes.

The Weber kettle is hackable. Because this grill is so popular, both Weber and other manufacturers offer a bunch of add-ons (such as charcoal baskets, pizza stones, and rotisseries) that increase its capabilities. Once we knew the Weber was our pick, we used a popular third-party accessory, the Slow ‘N Sear Deluxe charcoal basket, to smoke a rack of baby-back ribs. The grill performed terrifically, turning out tender ribs with great smoky flavor.

Maintaining a Weber grill is easy. Dump the handy ash catcher and scrub the grates each time you cook. Beyond that, give it the occasional deep clean and keep water away from the ashes (lest they combine into a corrosive lye), and you should be grilling happily on one of these for a decade or longer.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The 22-inch Weber Original Kettle Premium is short. The grates are just 27 inches from the ground, nine inches shy of the standard kitchen-counter height. So cooking on it can be a literal pain in the butt (and lower back). The Napoleon grill, which we otherwise didn’t love, is a generous 34 inches in height at the grate, making it more comfortable to work on.

The Weber grill has three legs—an inherently stable design, because having three points of contact means the legs will automatically “find their level,” even on bumpy ground. That said, the Napoleon model’s four legs felt just as stable, and more stiff, on a garden-variety concrete patio, and also allowed Napoleon to install a big, square shelf underneath the grill. The Weber grill has a smaller, triangular shelf, which is far less useful.

Finally, the Weber model doesn’t come with a grill cover. We think every grill should, even though most don’t. Weber sells one for its 22-inch kettle, usually for about $40.

How the Weber has held up

Kit Dillon, a Wirecutter senior staff writer (and author of our guide to the best charcoal), really loves this grill: “The [Weber] kettle is the best single grill on the planet—with a little knowledge, it works for basically every type of grilling (smoking, zones, reverse sear, slow) and is remarkably customizable if you’re focusing on one type of grilling (the Slow ‘N Sear is especially fantastic).”

We tested an older version of the 22-inch Napoleon Rodeo Charcoal Kettle Grill (NK22CK-L), which is considered one of the better Weber clones available. It performed well in our cooking tests, though not quite as well as the Weber model. And its unique heat-diffusing plate—a shallow metal dome that sits in the middle of the coal bed—was less effective than we’d hoped. However, its grates sit a full 7 inches higher than the Weber model’s, so it was less tiring to work on. The Napoleon grill’s four legs, versus the Weber grill’s three, make this grill more stable and allow for a nice, big shelf underneath.

Unfortunately, the Napoleon grill’s assembly was overly complex and potentially dangerous. The instructions were unreliable, the ash catcher was secured by tiny screws that didn’t inspire confidence, and the vent assembly was prone to error (and that’s coming from people who’ve assembled a lot of grills). The legs were also difficult to attach, exposing us to sharp edges that shaved the skin off our knuckles. When you consider that the Napoleon grill costs about $50 more than the Weber kettle that it emulates, the Weber model’s superiority is even starker.

We liked the original version of the PK Grill & Smoker that we tested. The thick cast-aluminum body holds and reflects heat efficiently, and it’s extremely sturdy and inherently rustproof. The shallow rectangular shape keeps the coals close to the grates, and its flat base works better for indirect grilling than sloped, round grills. It also has two vents each on both the top and bottom, allowing for better control over heat output. It was also impressively easy to assemble, and the built-in cart and shelves (there’s no cartless option) would be welcome on a patio that doesn’t have a worktable of its own.

But we also encountered a few traits on the PK Grill that we considered dealbreakers. Even before testing, we were concerned that the short distance between the grate and the top of the grill meant food could go flying. Sure enough, Sam Sifton accidentally flicked a chicken wing onto the ground. The grill box is also detachable, which seems convenient in theory but can prove a liability; if you don’t raise and lower the lid just so, it could slip out of the joint and brush against your hand (a burn danger) or fall off entirely. A single hinge on the grill grate makes it difficult to access all corners of the coal bed during cooking. And this grill has no ash catcher, which means anything sitting on that handy bottom shelf gets dusted with soot. All of these concerns made it difficult to justify this grill’s cost, which is double that of the Weber kettle.

We considered the Char-Griller Wrangler E2123 until we read a positive (again, positive) Amazon review that lists concerns like “these things will catch on fire,” “it will leave a grease stain on your deck or porch,” and “stuff comes loose.”

This article was edited by Marilyn Ong and Marguerite Preston.