Lid vent question

[Sauce]

I looked for  a bit, and couldn't find it here, sorry if I missed it. Why did Weber change the vent location on the new kettles? On kettles with a lid bail, it seems convenient to put the fuel to the left and food to right for an indirect cook. With that, it seems like most folks locate the vent over the food, which then the lid would have to be rotated 90 degrees with temp gauge to the left. To keep lid to see thermo directly, food would have to be at far end, while fuel would be right in front of you, and reaching over fuel to access food everytime. I know 2 areas of fuel can be placed on either side with food in middle, but a lot of cooks are done with just one area of fuel.

Has this been discussed?

What are your guys' thoughts?

Does vent location affect food cooking? I would think so.

Thanks in advance for any info, etc.

Sauce

[Jammato]

on my new masters touch the vent and the temp guage are on different sides, kind of strange to me and took a bit to get used to.

Yes I feel vent location does affect the cook, it creates the flow of the temperature, and that one needs to find out the optimum location for each grill and style of cook he is doing at that time on each grill. But then that seems to be different a bit for each climate.

I like the vent over the food when BBQing, when doing direct cooking I am not picky at all, when doing indirect at higher temps than BBQ, I tend to have it off to the side a bit

[ramsfan]

I had the same complaint about the new location of the lid vent. I used to have 4 WSM smokers (22.5,18.5,14.5, and the old vintage 1880) I sold all of them except for the vintage 1880 model because I prefer to smoke everything on a 26 rather than a WSM. I will never use a WSM again.

The 26.75 kettle IMO is much better for smoking than the WSM. You can control the temperature with one lever, not three. You don't have to get down to ground level to adjust three different vents. Furthermore, on the WSM, the vents are all located right next to the hot charcoal so they are freaking blistering HOT and impossible to touch with your bare hand meaning you have to use a glove, your foot or some tool in order to adjust them.

Another thing is that the WSM doesn't have wheels so you cannot move it once you start cooking. If a thunderstorm rolls up in the middle of 12 hr cook, your smoker will have to sit out in the rain and you will have to go out in the rain as well to tend to the food/fire. The taste and smoke flavor of the food is much better on a 26 than a WSM because the fire and smoke are much closer and hasn't been watered down by the water in the water bowl pan. These same benefits could easily apply to a 22.5 kettle as opposed to a 26.75 kettle, but I think a 26 is much better than a 22 for smoking purposes because it is much bigger and allows you to set the food back away from heat source plus the grill space is much larger for bigger cuts of meat or simply larger cooks. Now, on to the subject of the lid design change...

When I learned that Weber had moved the lid vent for 2015, I scrambled to find one of the last few remaining brand new 26'ers left on the market. I wanted mine to be brand new from the start as I plan on keeping it until the day somebody finds me laying dead on the ground in front of it with a fat greasy pork steak lodged in my artery.

When I walk up to the grill, I want the lid handle to be in the normal position that it should be so that I can easily slide the lid off to the left into the lid bale. When the lid is removed, I want to see the fire to the left and the food to the right so that I can easily tend to both as needed. With the food on the right side and the lid replaced, the food will be directly under the vent, where it should be.

Now that the lid vent has been moved, in order to keep the food directly under the vent, the food/fire configuration must be changed so that when you walk up to the grill and remove the lid, you must now reach over either the fire to tend to the food on the far side or reach over the food to tend to the fire on the far side OR you will have to continually keep walking around the grill every time you need to tend to whatever is on the far side. The only other solution is to keep spinning the lid to a 90 degree angle every time you remove AND replace the lid.

The other thing that is incredibly stupid about this new design is now the thermometer is located directly over the fire. Why would I want to know what the temperature is over the fire? That's not where my food is. I only need to know what the temperature is where my food is at. The new ash bucket design is terrible too. It requires you to have to squeeze the handle incredibly tight to compress it so it will click into place. They need to design the ash bucket so it slides into place like the filter compartment on an automatic coffee maker.

Although I'm talking about the lid design on a 26'er, this same argument could apply to a 22.5 as well since Weber made the same changes to that also.