Once a week, Sunny Moberg sets a cutting torch onto the surface of steel containers that once held one thousand gallons of flammable fuel. These propane tanks, delivered to Moberg’s shop in Dripping Springs by the trailer load, are all salvaged. Some were decommissioned decades ago. It seems counterintuitive to introduce fire to such a container, but Moberg is used to it. “I’ve been cutting into tanks for twenty years,” he tells me. I ask him whether he worries about an explosion from unreleased propane, a gas that’s heavier than air, sitting in the tanks after all these years. “I don’t want to say I get too comfortable,” Moberg says, adding, “I say a little prayer before cutting into each one.”
What was once considered trash is now in high demand. The popularity of smokers made from propane tanks has risen right along with the Texas-style barbecue boom across the state and the world. Instead of discussing smoker size by length, width, or cubic inches, it’s gallons that have become the most recognizable unit. One-thousand-gallon smokers are the big ones inside many restaurant smokehouses. They also come in five-hundred and 250-hundred-gallon sizes, but the latter are often cut in half to serve as fireboxes for the big boys. All of them are getting harder to find.
Moberg, who owns Moberg Smokers, says he used to find them for free, but salvage yards have gotten wise to the popularity of propane tanks. The 16-foot-long tubes, with half spheres on either end, have become the badge proving a new barbecue joint’s wood-cooking bonafides. Beauty shots of one-thousand-gallon smokers in barbecue joints all over the world—Moberg has smokers headed to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada currently—have become almost as popular as photos of the barbecue itself. Moberg is now paying anywhere from $300 to $1,200 for a one-thousand-gallon propane tank. He even jokes, “There may be a day where I’ll have to buy from the manufacturer,” but quickly adds that the older ones are prized because the walls of the tanks are thicker, making for more efficient smokers. They’re a finite commodity.
As the grandson of Albert C. “Smokey” Denmark, the founder of Smokey Denmark’s Smoked Meats Co., Moberg says, “I have smoking in my genes.” The first smoker he ever built was for himself, made from a water heater, and he describes it as “a horrible smoker.” He built another from a propane tank in 1992 after a customer brought it to him. It was an improvement, but he didn’t think much about making a career out of it then. Moberg’s welding skills were focused on building trailers. It took a Texas pitmaster to first make these smokers a real commercial venture.
In 2015, John Lewis Jr. was working as the pitmaster at la Barbecue in Austin, but was planning a new barbecue joint in Charleston, South Carolina. He needed some additional funding for what would become Lewis Barbecue in 2016. With the help of his father, John Lewis Sr., Austin Smoke Works was born in a welding shop. Their first customer was the mayor of Brownsville. Then Cattleack Barbecue in Dallas ordered one, and a few went to ZZQ in Richmond, Virginia. Each new order that came in was bittersweet for Lewis Jr. He had designed these smokers, and “I didn’t want anyone to get the design,” he says, noting that some details had been proprietary. Still, he needed the money. “I had to do it,” he says.
Those design details may seem trivial, but they can mean the difference between a consistent cooking temperature versus unforgiving hot and cold spots inside the smoker. This style of smoker isn’t mechanical. There are no blowers, fans, or automatic dampers. There’s no rotisserie. It’s just wood fire and fluid dynamics. Briskets sit idly within that 16-foot-long cooking chamber, and hopefully, a continuous ribbon of sweet smelling smoke wafts along their surface between the firebox and the exhaust stack at the other end. It requires draw, or a pressure difference that pulls heat and smoke from the firebox and slings it up the exhaust stack. Ideally, that moving air drops as little of its heat as possible from one end of the cooking chamber to the other. It’s the same concept as the old brick pits at joints like Kreuz and Smitty’s in Lockhart, just done with a new material on smokers that are a bit more portable.
Despite the overwhelming popularity of the one-thousand-gallon size, Lewis believes a five-hundred-gallon smoker size is naturally suited to the task of keeping an even airflow and temperature differential. “A lot of tricky things go into it to try and mimic what happens in a five-hundred-gallon pit into a thousand-gallon pit,” he says, but concedes, “If you’re going to make one fire, you might as well be cooking more things, right?” That’s why he uses a fleet of four one-thousand-gallon smokers from Austin Smoke Works in his Charleston pit room.
Lewis, who first cooked on a one-thousand-gallon smoker at Franklin Barbecue, said he studied that pressure imbalance to try and improve the draw when he built his first smoker. When he took over pit duties at la Barbecue in 2012, he wasn’t happy with the smoker he inherited. So, years before Austin Smoke Works was founded, he built his first pit using a propane tank as a replacement. “I fired it up for the first night” once the new smoker was competed, he says. Lewis continues the story with pride still in his voice: “I was sitting in a lawn chair about ten feet away for the firebox door, and had lit a fire in there. I sat down, opened a beer, and lit a cigarette. It started drawing my cigarette smoke, from ten feet away, into the firebox and through the smoker.” That’s when he knew his smoker design was a winner.
What was once considered trash is now in high demand. The popularity of smokers made from propane tanks has risen right along with the Texas-style barbecue boom across the state and the world. Instead of discussing smoker size by length, width, or cubic inches, it’s gallons that have become the most recognizable unit. One-thousand-gallon smokers are the big ones inside many restaurant smokehouses. They also come in five-hundred and 250-hundred-gallon sizes, but the latter are often cut in half to serve as fireboxes for the big boys. All of them are getting harder to find.Moberg, who owns Moberg Smokers, says he used to find them for free, but salvage yards have gotten wise to the popularity of propane tanks. The 16-foot-long tubes, with half spheres on either end, have become the badge proving a new barbecue joint’s wood-cooking bonafides. Beauty shots of one-thousand-gallon smokers in barbecue joints all over the world—Moberg has smokers headed to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada currently—have become almost as popular as photos of the barbecue itself. Moberg is now paying anywhere from $300 to $1,200 for a one-thousand-gallon propane tank. He even jokes, “There may be a day where I’ll have to buy from the manufacturer,” but quickly adds that the older ones are prized because the walls of the tanks are thicker, making for more efficient smokers. They’re a finite commodity.
As the grandson of Albert C. “Smokey” Denmark, the founder of Smokey Denmark’s Smoked Meats Co., Moberg says, “I have smoking in my genes.” The first smoker he ever built was for himself, made from a water heater, and he describes it as “a horrible smoker.” He built another from a propane tank in 1992 after a customer brought it to him. It was an improvement, but he didn’t think much about making a career out of it then. Moberg’s welding skills were focused on building trailers. It took a Texas pitmaster to first make these smokers a real commercial venture.
In 2015, John Lewis Jr. was working as the pitmaster at la Barbecue in Austin, but was planning a new barbecue joint in Charleston, South Carolina. He needed some additional funding for what would become Lewis Barbecue in 2016. With the help of his father, John Lewis Sr., Austin Smoke Works was born in a welding shop. Their first customer was the mayor of Brownsville. Then Cattleack Barbecue in Dallas ordered one, and a few went to ZZQ in Richmond, Virginia. Each new order that came in was bittersweet for Lewis Jr. He had designed these smokers, and “I didn’t want anyone to get the design,” he says, noting that some details had been proprietary. Still, he needed the money. “I had to do it,” he says.
Those design details may seem trivial, but they can mean the difference between a consistent cooking temperature versus unforgiving hot and cold spots inside the smoker. This style of smoker isn’t mechanical. There are no blowers, fans, or automatic dampers. There’s no rotisserie. It’s just wood fire and fluid dynamics. Briskets sit idly within that 16-foot-long cooking chamber, and hopefully, a continuous ribbon of sweet smelling smoke wafts along their surface between the firebox and the exhaust stack at the other end. It requires draw, or a pressure difference that pulls heat and smoke from the firebox and slings it up the exhaust stack. Ideally, that moving air drops as little of its heat as possible from one end of the cooking chamber to the other. It’s the same concept as the old brick pits at joints like Kreuz and Smitty’s in Lockhart, just done with a new material on smokers that are a bit more portable.
Despite the overwhelming popularity of the one-thousand-gallon size, Lewis believes a five-hundred-gallon smoker size is naturally suited to the task of keeping an even airflow and temperature differential. “A lot of tricky things go into it to try and mimic what happens in a five-hundred-gallon pit into a thousand-gallon pit,” he says, but concedes, “If you’re going to make one fire, you might as well be cooking more things, right?” That’s why he uses a fleet of four one-thousand-gallon smokers from Austin Smoke Works in his Charleston pit room.
Lewis, who first cooked on a one-thousand-gallon smoker at Franklin Barbecue, said he studied that pressure imbalance to try and improve the draw when he built his first smoker. When he took over pit duties at la Barbecue in 2012, he wasn’t happy with the smoker he inherited. So, years before Austin Smoke Works was founded, he built his first pit using a propane tank as a replacement. “I fired it up for the first night” once the new smoker was competed, he says. Lewis continues the story with pride still in his voice: “I was sitting in a lawn chair about ten feet away for the firebox door, and had lit a fire in there. I sat down, opened a beer, and lit a cigarette. It started drawing my cigarette smoke, from ten feet away, into the firebox and through the smoker.” That’s when he knew his smoker design was a winner.
by Daniel Vaughn, Texas Monthly | Read more:
Image: Daniel Vaughn
