About that BBQ

I bought my first charcoal grill about 1980. Ya, I'd had one of those little hibachis, but around '80 I went wild and scored myself one of those Weber kettles.


Me and the Weber got off to a rocky start.


First off, I was taking a bit of a flyer here. You can buy a propane grill for the price of a Weber kettle.


I struggled with that.


Eventually I made a commitment to charcoal.


So I pick up my new Weber at the Home Hardware in Guelph, when it was still on the corner of Woolwich and Speedvale. The guy who owned the store lived three or four doors down the street from me. It always makes me feel virtuous when I can support the locals.


I'm pushing my kettle to the car. It wobbles and then wobbles worse. A wheel falls off. The kettle kilters... and collapses.


I'm a bit pissed off.


I pay premium dollars for a Weber kettle and the fucking thing breaks down before we're out of the parking lot!


I know, it's a high school part-timer making minimum wage who assembled this.  I try to keep my cool. The wheel portion of the grill is now completely separate from the kettle part.


I load the various parts in the trunk and head home.


Anyway, I get her home and bolt everything up the way it should have been done in the first place, and by gosh that Weber kettle did me twelve months a year BBQ for the next twenty years!


I bring this up because I witnessed somebody spending a good ten minutes scrubbing a grill the other day, with one of those wire brush thingies.


My Weber kettle did yeoman work for twenty years.


Number of times I scrubbed the grill?


Zero!


I don't know what people think they're doing when they scrub the BBQ grill... just fire that puppy up and let the heat purify the grill!


Yup, that Weber kettle went twenty years without being touched with a wire brush. Must have fed hundreds over the years.


And the last steak we cooked on it was flavored just a little by every BBQ from the last twenty years.