A buoy designed for use in Lake Michigan can cook a steak? What???

In 1950 a part owner and worker at a sheet metal fabrication company in Mount Prospect Illinois decided that he had had enough ruined meat and burned food produced on the old timey open top grills that were available at the time. This company, among other things, built buoys that were used in Lake Michigan, two spheres that were welded together to make them water tight. After some work cutting one apart and some additional fabrication on a rounded removable top the “Sputnik” had arrived. George Stephen Sr. decided to call the contraption the “George’s Barbeque Kettle” instead of the name Sputnik his neighbors had attached to his invention. By 1952 sales of George’s Barbeque Kettle were continuing to increase so the barbecue division of the company was established. George Stephen Sr. then bought out the “Weber Brothers factory” and dedicated it to produce only the Kettle grills, the Weber Kettle grills. The Weber Kettle grills are the best grill ever designed and placed into production, period.

I love to grill out, from steaks to a wonderful pork roast to the perfectly grilled bacon wrapped shrimp. I have found the 22.5 inch kettle made by Weber to be, bar none, the best grill in the world and have used one exclusively for almost 20 years. In the early days of my adulthood I ate food prepared on other peoples “Weber kettle”. In 1990 I purchased my first kettle, we had just moved to a new city and did not have a lot of money. My wife came home from the grocery with a BEAUTIFUL set of ribs for dinner, she also had a disposable grill she had paid 3.99 for. You know the kind, it was a thin aluminum pan with charcoal and grate built in, a one shot deal. Well one look at that piece of crap grill and one more look at the BEAUTIFUL ribs and I realized even with our limited financial resources we could not risk losing our investment by ruining those ribs. Seems I remember we had about 80 bucks left in checking until the next payday so we did not have a lot of resources. Since we had just moved to our new city we did not know anyone at all, let alone someone that would loan us a grill. I made the critical decision to take 59 of our 80 dollars and use it to purchase a 22.5 inch Weber Kettle, black was the only color available then. Damn those ribs were good! We somehow survived and made it to the next payday without starving.

That grill served us well during our apartment dwelling days, although I did have to carry it down to the ground floor to use it. It remained an outside unit for the duration of our apartment life. When we moved into our first house, I wanted to store the kettle, as it had became known, out of the weather. After much consternation, I realized that the limited inside space on the house, this was a car port home and very limited shed space that the kettle would have to live outside. A couple of coats of wax were my answer to keeping it outside. While that coat of wax produced some odors, on the outside, there was no affect on its cooking ability or the taste of the food cooked inside. I found that the grates, one to hold the charcoal and the cooking grate needed replaced after about 5 years, I was OK with that, as it seemed a small price to pay for the fabulous meals I could prepare. For the entire 9 years we lived in that house the kettle sat out back, exposed to the weather, I had long since given up on the waxing. When we moved to our second home, old kettle came along, he was showing only minimal signs of his outdoor living. By 2007 it was becoming apparent to me that I was going to have put kettle down. His legs were giving out, his three vents, lungs I called them, along the bottom had long since been cobbled back on and the wooden handles were long gone. I was not looking forward to having to put him down. He was my friend for 17 years and provided me good service for entire length of our relationship. I was very sad, therapy helped but never completely removed the sting.

I was so distraught that I wrote a letter to Weber to tell of my disappointment in kettles short 17-year life span. I received word back from the folks at Weber that kettles come with a warrantee but my kettle was past that period. Kettle and I had gotten more years than the coverage period, my sadness was lifting and I began to just appreciate the extra time we were allowed to share. When kettle and I started our relationship Weber did not have the large selection of grilling options that are available today. When I was researching a replacement for kettle, replacing kettle is still hard for me to say, I found that there are many options when it comes to outdoor grilling, even in the Weber line up. I found two grills in the 22.5 inch, charcoal burning line, the “One Touch Gold” and the “One Touch Silver”. Both had some design changes, some might call them improvements but I was apprehensive. The one touch silver was closest to my kettle with the exception of the lungs, kettle had three individually adjustable vents with round holes, something I found effective for controlling and localizing the heat when cooking pork roasts. This one touch silver had a new fangled integrated venting system, more parts meaning more parts that could fail was my thought. This new fangled thing has one handle that controlled airflow through all three vents, which had become slots instead of the round holes kettle had used. The one touch gold model had other fancy contraptions to catch ashes as well as the integrated venting system, to many innovative accessories for me so I immediately ruled it out as an option. I did finally make the agonizing decision to get the one touch silver in the standard black, all the color options confused me and I wanted kettle’s replacement to follow the lead of kettle and have the same heritage.

After fashioning my own hard maple handles to replace the injection molded plastic ones that came stock. Junior and I have developed a good relationship with each other, he will never replace kettle in my mind but all of kettle’s memory lives on in Junior.

What kind of grill do you use?