Part 4 - will be our final part post to our history leading up to the time of this posting.

It's Friday morning the day before our grand opening. I'd just received a $1500 shipment of produce and products from Sysco. About 20 minutes later the Flowers Bread delivery rep dropped off our bun order for the weekend and things are looking great. About 10 minutes later I received a call from my brother telling me my mother had just passed away. I was at a loss for words and thoughts, I didn't know what to do and after about an hour of thinking about it, I decided that while I wasn't sure why she died that day but I didn't think that it was too stop our grand opening and I couldn't see postponing thing helping me grieve in any way. So the decision was made to fire up the cooker later that evening and proceed with our grand opening. After cooking through the night without a minute of sleep it's now a cool crisp Saturday morning and our opening day. We are on-site in Lexington preparing to open at 11 am. At about 10:55 am Chris my childhood best friend and his parents from back home in Clifton Forge made the trip over after hearing of my mom’s passing. I hadn't seen him in a long time so we were standing behind the trailer talking and I had finished cooking, Jennifer and her sister Jamie were in the trailer ready to serve some customers if we were lucky enough to get any. Chris and I had been talking for about 15 minutes and I was completely unaware of anything going on in the food trailer or even if we had a customer when Jennifer popped out the backside and yelled to me to come help quickly. I thought she had a question about something and as I stepped up on the trailer I was staring through the vending window directly at a line of customers over 50 feet long. At that point, I wanted to drop to the floor and cry. Partially because of my mother’s passing and partially because seeing that huge line of customers at that moment gave me the sense that all our hard work and investment might actually pay off.

Our 2010 year was a great year blending both competition barbecue and catering. This was also the year largely due to a television series called BBQ Pitmasters on TLC Network that the barbecue boom started in America. It was unplanned perfect timing for us to open a barbecue business and we spent the next few years growing it and competing in competition barbecue.

In 2011 we added another large Lang 84 BBQ Cooker (above) to our arsenal, then added yet another Fast Eddy Cooker in 2013 tripling our cooking capacity from what it was when we opened the business. We now have a cooking capacity to cook about 800 lbs of pork in one run. By late 2012-13, we were having to choose between spending time and money competing vs booking catering dates on weekends of competitions we wanted to attend. It's difficult to rationalize spending tons of money to compete on a barbecue competition circuit to see if judges think our barbecue will stand out when the phone is ringing off the hook with clients wanting to pay us to barbecue. While we had won a Virginia State BBQ 1st Place Beef Brisket Championship in 2010 and a reserve grand championship in a non-sanctioned event in 2009 along with many other awards winning a grand championship had eluded us and to this day it's something I've wanted to achieve and never have.

This brings our journey up to our winter break here in early 2018 and I'm beginning to get that itch to fire the cookers back up for a new and exciting barbecue season! We've met a ton of great people and made great friends throughout our barbecue journey. We've been able to donate time, money, and barbecue to many great causes over the past 10 years that we never would have been able to do were it not for barbecue. We even taught a beginner barbecue class with around 25 students in 2013 and hopefully gave them the spark to one day fire their own barbecue journey.

So now you know our story. The next time you enjoy our barbecue I hope you remember our story and how it came to be on your plate and it makes your barbecue taste just a little better knowing its evolution. There are many more stories to fill in the gaps of this four-part blog post and I'm sure they will all be future posts. If I kept writing this would have turned into a book and quite possibly an uninteresting one. If you ever see me out at a barbecue event I may be quiet or appear half dead, just remember I've probably been up all night stoking the fires and I'm just a little sluggish. So come on up, say hi and we'll talk barbecue!! May the journey never end........

Below Photos Courtesy of KATELIN JAMES PHOTOGRAPHY