You always remember your first love. I started my journey with a cheap cabinet smoker, moved onto a vertical pellet smoker, then went to the Old Country Gravity smoker. All of these felt like casual flings after I bought the Brazos.
Now, is it a perfect smoker? No, of course not. There are some minor quibbles, many of which I’ve fixed with a few mods. And it’s not the largest cook area or neatest looking smoker, but it’s a fantastic entry point into the world of offsets.
The Base Requirement for a Great Offset
When you go to your local hardware store, you see a pretty fair selection of smokers. True, these days, most of them are pellet grills. There’s nothing wrong with that: most folks probably appreciate the simplicity of a pellet smoker. But, if you’re looking for an offset, your options are limited in more ways than one.
You’ve probably seen the Char-Griller offset. Many times, it’s sold as just the grill, with a separate firebox attachment you can buy. This alone should be a red flag: they’re not building it to smoke and it certainly shows. The cheap, thin steel means the entire thing weighs less than 150 pounds. A stiff breeze would knock it over.
That thin steel belies the true problem: it won’t hold a temperature with any level of consistency.
It’s possible that your hardware store may also have something a little higher end, like an Oklahoma Joe’s smoker. While you can easily tell the difference, you’ll notice that they only brag about the thickness of the metal on the firebox. The smoker itself is something like a 1/10″ thick. This, too, is far too thin to keep a good measure of temperature control.
No: there is a gold standard in smoker thickness and the Old Country Brazos meets it. You’re never going to go wrong when you buy a smoker that’s made from 1/4″ thick steel. While this makes the smoker less portable, to be sure, it also makes it very easy to learn the proper techniques of a pit-master.
The DLX Difference
You might have seen the regular Brazos and the DLX on the floor at Academy or Buc-cee’s. What’s makes the DLX better? And is that difference worth the cost? I demonstrate this difference in the video: the primary difference is the counter-weight on the cook chamber door. 1/4″ steel gets heavy and you’re going to be in and out of that thing throughout the day. The counterweight makes it far easier on the arms to open and close.
If this doesn’t matter to you, the only other difference between the DLX and the standard Brazos is an included tuning plate on the DLX. Personally, I could take or leave this. Moving it around in the cook chamber more or less just changed where the hotspot was. That’d be fine if you could mitigate the hot spot that’s near the firebox, but it doesn’t do that. It pushes it further into the cook chamber and makes your temperatures uneven. I tried moving this thing by an inch at a time and taking measurements. It didn’t make a difference: I just didn’t see a use for it.
Cook Surface
I could probably copy/paste the square inches provided by Old Country, but that doesn’t really matter, does it? Do you know how many square inches an average brisket is? I don’t and I’ve cooked countless briskets. Suffice it to say that the bottom cook area can handle two medium sized briskets mostly comfortably, keeping both of them a sufficient distance from the firebox. That said, it’d be a kind of a pain. They’ll fit, but they’ll be a little crowded. I have cooked a brisket and a decently sized pork butt at the same time and didn’t have any issues on space. There’s also plenty of height on the bottom rack. Usually, I’ll have a large item on the smoke stack side and cook brats or ribs on the firebox side.
Speaking of ribs, the top shelf is pretty small, but is perfect for a couple of racks of St. Louis ribs. The top of the smoker is awfully close to the rack, but the rack slides out for easy access.
Smoke Stack
The stack size is a bit small, to be honest. Yes, size does matter. The short stack means that draw through the cook chamber isn’t fantastic to start. That said, such things are easily remedied. I bought a small 5″ to 6″ coupler and a 3 foot piece of stove pipe and now my airflow is fantastic. I’d highly recommend this basic mod to anyone thinking about purchasing this smoker. It’s probably only going to run you another $30 or so and it makes a huge difference.
Speaking of mods, a lot of people swear by removing the baffle between the firebox and cook chamber. I’ve not done it on mine because I didn’t see a big benefit. I later heard from other folks that they saw more even temperatures throughout the bottom of the cook chamber, but it essentially made the top rack too hot to use for anything other than sausage or quick-cooking items. That’s a hard pass for me. I like to maximize my cook surface.
Worth the Money?
Absolutely. This is a 1/4″ steel smoker at a fantastic price. The basic Brazos is generally around $1200, the DLX costing a further $100. Whether that $100 counterweight is worth it is up to you, but I find it to be of sufficient value.
I would absolutely save my money for something like this versus buying the $300 Home Depot special. Granted, these aren’t available everywhere: if you can’t find one of these, don’t settle for cheap, thin steel. You’ll be doing yourself a favor.
If you’d like to see it cook, give a watch to the video above. We also go into some of the finer points of the smoker. The best way to make up your mind is to see it in action!
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