Blog 2 Hogback History in BBQ Part 1

Similar to our first cooker

This will be a 4-part series of posts, I plan to release one post per day until all four parts are posted. Please share and subscribe to the blog if you enjoy reading our posts.


Part 1- One of the most common questions we get asked is "How did you get into barbecue?". I usually answer the question with just a few bits of the whole story. I thought I'd tell the complete story from the beginning. It was 1991 I was living in my hometown of Clifton Forge, Virginia, and a friend invited me to Gypsy Hill Park in Staunton, Virginia where his brother was having a small get-together for some cold brews and a flag football game. Once there I stepped out of the car and the smell hit me for the first in my life. It was the smell of a small pig cooking over open coals. The family was taking turns mopping the pig while we played football and I enjoyed some real barbecue for the first time. To this point in my life barbecue was thick, tacky, and somewhat burnt barbecue sauce mopped on grill chicken that my mom cooked on the backyard grill. As good as it was it paled in comparison to my first real barbecue that day in the park.

A few months later I found myself at a NASCAR race at The Rock in Rockingham, North Carolina. Prior to the drop of the green flag, there must have been 30 barbecue cookers smoking up the infield of the track so much you could barely see the track. About 45 minutes prior to the race, officials scurried through the infield making pitmasters extinguish the fires so the ESPN Team would be able to film the race.  Sadly this second experience of barbecue I only got to smell the barbecue and see the smokers pillowing smoke out of their stacks dreaming of how good it would taste. This, however, was enough to kindle a spark of interest in this thing called barbecue. A few years later in 1994 and I was 23 years old hanging out with friends on the Cowpasture River during the summer, swimming, and partying into the nights on weekends. There were always 20-30 people or more around and we were always looking for something to eat. In August I took a trip to Fayetteville, North Carolina to visit my uncle for the weekend, on Saturday night my uncle and I took a ride to see one of his best friends. Little did I know that when we arrived at the shop out behind his house there would be barbecue cookers setting everywhere. It turns out he made cookers on the side for money and he charged around $1200 for one. This was far more than I wanted to spend so I told him if he ever had a cheaper one that was used I'd be interested in buying it. He pointed to the back 40 and said "there is one back next to the weeds I'll sell you for $350" and just like that I struck a check and purchased my first barbecue cooker. It was a trailer-mounted oval oil drum cooker designed to cook whole hogs.

 I pulled the cooker back to Virginia with plans of cooking hogs out on the river with friends on weekends. It was now late August, summer was just about over and people hanging on the river were dropping like the leaves of autumn that would soon start falling. Sadly you find friends who go off to wars, and college and get married and for many different reasons, I never found myself out on the river with large groups of people again. Another 4 years would pass with my barbecue cooker setting in the yard and never once get fired up to cook barbecue. It's now 1998 I've just gotten married to my beautiful wife Jennifer and we are as broke as broke can get just after getting our own place to live and stocking up with the essentials of life. Our car was in bad need of a $400 set of tires and my mom calls me to tell me that a man named Mustard who owned a food truck name Mustards Ketchup Mobile had knocked on her door wanting to buy my barbecue cooker and for $400 he got a cooker and I got new tires.

It was now Christmas season in 1998, Jennifer must have seen there was a spark or something in my facial expressions that even though I needed to sell that cooker I didn't really want to. So she bought me a $29 Brinkman Smoker for Christmas that year and 2 days later I lit my first fire as a barbecue cook. The story of this day will be another blog post in the near future as it's a great story on its own. Over the next few years, we cooked the most amazing barbecue one could eat. Well, not really but it felt that way at the time. Around 2002-2003 I'd worn out the cheap Brinkman and it was time to upgrade cookers which I did to the very popular at the time CharGriller which was an offset smoker and grill that would hold about 4 butts comfortably. We spent our weekends honing our barbecue skills while camping or on holidays cooking some good barbecue and some bad. I remember one 4th of July having to throw whole racks of expensive pork ribs in the trash as they were inedible. To this point in our barbecue journey, it was nothing serious, just fun and something we would do several times each summer. Our History Through Barbecue Part 2 coming soon...

The first cooker I used. I called her R2D2