Smokers Wild BBQ is an independent publication about backyard smoking. Fire management, temperature control, equipment, and the long slow cooks that take all day and mostly reward patience over technique.
Everything here comes from cooks we actually did. Not roundups of other people’s opinions, not recipes rewritten from somewhere else. If there’s a photo of a brisket on this site, somebody here cooked that brisket, and if it came out badly we say so.
What we cover
Documented cooks. Start to finish, with the actual timeline. Not the idealized version where the stall lasts ninety minutes and everything hits temp on schedule.
Fire and temperature. Wood, airflow, managing a pit that runs hot on one side. The stuff that determines the outcome before seasoning ever enters into it.
Equipment. Gear we own and have used long enough to have an opinion about. When something disappoints us we’ll say that too.
Side-by-side tests. Two racks, one variable, same pit, same day. There’s a lot of barbecue advice floating around that nobody has ever actually checked, and some of it turns out to be wrong.
Troubleshooting. Why the bark went soft, why it stalled at 150 and stayed there, why the smoke tastes like an ashtray.
How we work
We cook the thing before we write about it. That sounds like a low bar and it is, but a lot of barbecue content on the internet doesn’t clear it.
All photography is our own. Every image on this site is from a cook that happened, which is also why some of the pictures aren’t especially flattering.
We don’t take payment for coverage. No sponsored posts, no paid placements, nobody sends us a smoker in exchange for a nice writeup. If that ever changes it’ll be labeled clearly and obviously.
Barbecue attracts strong opinions and a fair amount of received wisdom that nobody has tested. We’d rather run the test and report what happened, even when the answer is boring or it turns out the old advice was right all along.
A note on the name
Smokers Wild BBQ is an independent editorial publication. It is not affiliated with, connected to, or a continuation of any restaurant, food truck, or catering business that may have operated under a similar name. We publish about barbecue. We don’t sell it, cater it, or cook it for anybody but ourselves.