When we lived in Ann Arbor, MI several years ago, our apartment complex wouldn’t let us use a charcoal grill. Thus, we had to purchase a gas grill. Being a charcoal guy I was incredibly disappointed.
Fast forward 6-7 years later our $119.00 Wal-mart special gas grill had seen its better days. Out of gas and needing to replace the burners and more it was time to upgrade.
Using a birthday gift certificate from Sue (Ellen’s mom) and some ad money from the blog I purchased the Brinkmann Profession Stainless Steel Charcoal Grill (model 810-3214-S) as the replacement. That’s right, charcoal! I unboxed it last night and put it together on the deck. I was a bit worried that putting it together was going to take a long time but it didn’t. Actually I cost myself about 15 minutes or more for not reading the manual. I thought at first the unit was missing holes in the side of it but later realized I had to turn the pegs on the legs inward. Here’s a parts screen shot.
And the final product looks like this:
While this is nowhere near the most expensive grill on the planet it has some features that I really like about it:
- It is stainless steel to minimize rust
- It has 540 inches of cooking surface which will basically cook 75lbs of food. Yeah I think that is plenty!
- Porcelain coated iron cooking grills (minimizes rust)
- Ability to adjust charcoal to different heights
- Easy slide out charcoal tray
- Built-in temperature gauge
All in all I’m satisfied with the quality and Brinkmann is known to make good products and the availability of parts is also a plus. Tonight I’ll be curing the grill which will take about 4 hours. After that, it is BBQ time!