How to Buy a Charcoal Grill Without Wasting Money

The four things that matter

Adjustable vents, top and bottom. Airflow is your only temperature control, and a grill without adjustable vents at both ends cannot be controlled. This rules out a large number of cheap grills immediately.

A lid that fits. Without a well fitting lid you cannot cook indirect, cannot roast and cannot smoke. You have a fire pit with a grate over it, which is a fine thing but not a grill.

Enough depth to bank coals properly. A shallow bowl cannot hold a deep bed on one side with a genuinely cool zone opposite. Depth is what makes two zone cooking possible.

An ash removal system, or at least easy access. On a long cook, ash chokes the bottom vent and kills the fire. On a grill with no way to clear it, this is a real limitation rather than an inconvenience.

What does not matter as much as the marketing suggests

• Built-in lid thermometers. Usually inaccurate and measuring the wrong place. You will buy a probe anyway.
• Total cooking area quoted including warming racks. A warming rack is not cooking area.
• Side shelves and tool hooks. Nice, easily added, not worth paying a premium for.
• Adjustable-height charcoal grates, which sound useful and are usually fiddly. Vent control does the same job better.
• Grate material, within reason. Cast iron holds heat better than plated steel, and it is a cheap upgrade later.

What size should I buy?

22 inches for most households. It cooks for two as easily as it cooks for eight, and it is the size the entire accessory market is built around. 18 inches is genuinely tight once you bank coals to one side, which costs you half the grate. 26 inches is excellent if you regularly cook for a crowd and wasteful if you do not, because it burns considerably more fuel.

Spend the difference here instead

If your budget is four hundred dollars, a two hundred dollar kettle plus a chimney starter, an instant read thermometer, a bag of decent lump and a bag of briquettes will produce far better food than a four hundred dollar grill with none of those. The accessories change your cooking; the grill mostly just holds the fire.