Will gas grills become a relic in 10 years? *(Split Topic by Cellar2ful)

[HoosierKettle]

I fail to see the convenience of pellet grills over kettles. I can start a snake and leave for hours.

Sent from my iPhone using Weber Kettle Club mobile app

My overnight cooks are glorious. 

Remember the preferred target audience, people who are not like us in that they feel charcoal is "too messy" "takes too long"  "tastes bad" whatever the excuse is for someone who is a simple person or ignorant of how to use charcoal grills.

So true!  Most of the people I know with pellet grills do not want to mess with charcoal.  In fact they usually are switching from a gas grill as you had eluded to what the market is doing. I also know some of those same people that got rid of their pellet grills to go back to gas. It is interesting to watch the trends of the normal people.


Sent from my iPhone using Weber Kettle Club mobile app

[LightningBoldtz]

So will gas grills become relics?  hard to say as I said before maybe a bit of an overstatement.  You will always have those people that just want to "BBQ" dogs and burgers on the gas grill.  However there is a decent portion of people that love BBQ and the pellet grill is perfect for that.  One of my friends who I make fun of because he literally six months ago would tell me he wanted to BBQ a steak and ask what kindto buy, just made pulled pork for a group of people last weekend on my portable pellet grill.  You will always have purists, there are people who swear by stick burners but you wouldn't catch me dead with one.  All I can tell you is, my experience is the pellet market cannot be ignored, I am glad Weber is dipping their toe in, just wish they did it 5 years ago. 

[cookingjnj]

Ok, I do not think I fall into the "normal" category as I have come to the "dark side" late in life from the convenient and clean (sarcastic) other side. 

I currently have a gasser (Weber Genesis), a pellet cooker (RecTec) and two 22" kettle grills (Weber / Happy Cooker).  I have had Weber gassers for 30+ years and have used them at least 3-4 times a week during that time.  (I am on the road travelling for work or would use even more).  I used them for high heat searing, low and slow cooking and even smoking.  I looked a the pellet cookers 4 years ago and liked them for the quality of the low and slow and the smoke cooks which were much harder to achieve with a gasser.  JUST this year I purchased my two kettle grills, and have LOVED the experience.  Don't know what took me 30+ years, but have a lot of catching up to do.  Since I do have the pellet, I have not tried any low and slow long cooks with the kettles, but they have become my go to cooking units for everything else.  I use them now 3-4 times a week every week since owning them.  I tried some high temp searing burgers/steaks etc with the pellet, but since they burn so efficient not much flavor comes from cooking with the pellets at high heat (at least to me).  The kettles are perfect for that.   It is sad, but my gasser has really become more of a stainless steel shelf to hold items from the kettles and pellet grills while using them. 

With all that said, I am not sure the gas cooking experience will go away completely, but at least for me, I have found other cookers that do the same job, much better and with usually much better results.  For me, I see less and less gas in my future.

[jhagestad]

After having just spent a long weekend closing my MIL's cottage with a few of my buddies, I can attest that I don't see pellet grills replacing gas grills. We used the 22" kettle for cooking our dinners every night (which were fun but planned productions in themselves), but we also used the Weber Spirit gas grill every day for cooking bacon in the morning or a frozen pizza late at night. The ease and versatility of the gas grill made cooking these things so easy. We had no need for smoke flavor for these items so a pellet grill would have been a waste. The gas grill really came in handy when we wanted to cook something right away with no charcoal fussing, etc.