Gateway Drum Smoker Straight Up 55G

Gateway's 30-gallon drum: the same welded intakes, adjustable stack, 1000°F-rated finish and center-mounted dial as the 55G, in a barrel roughly half the volume with two grate levels instead of three and an 18-inch grate instead of 22. It is the one to buy if you cook for a family rather than a crowd but still want the damper control and build quality of the competition drum. Gateway's own product page notes a fuel load runs about five to seven hours.

Built in Columbia, Missouri, and the drum that Meathead's AmazingRibs put on the map. Its distinguishing part is the patented Vortex charcoal basket, which spins the intake air around the fire instead of straight up through it, and a single lever-operated intake with a printed scale so you can return to a known setting rather than guessing at a ball valve. The grate rides on a five-position pin lock and stays level while you move it, and all the grates and external hardware are 304 stainless rather than chrome-plated mild steel.

Pit Boss's take on the drum smoker: a 24-inch barrel that cooks the Pit Barrel way, with meat hung on rods over a charcoal basket rather than laid on grates, plus three porcelain-coated grates for when you want to cook flat. The triple row of hanging rods takes twelve racks of ribs, which is more than double what a Pit Barrel Classic holds, and it is the largest drum in the mainstream market.

The Oklahoma Joe's Bronco Pro is a heavy-duty 21.5-inch charcoal drum smoker with a sealed intake-pipe airflow system that gives drum-style cooking unusually precise temperature control, plus meat hangers and hooks for classic hang-style smoking.

Pit Barrel's largest drum and the one the catalog is missing at the top end: a 22.5-inch porcelain-coated barrel with three hanging rods and sixteen hooks against the Classic's two rods and eight. Pit Barrel rates it at 16 to 20 racks of ribs, four pork butts, four full packer briskets or four turkeys in a single load, which is catering and competition capacity rather than backyard capacity. The trade-off is the one Pit Barrel prints on the page themselves: with a light load there is less meat absorbing heat, so the barrel runs hotter than the 18.5.

The largest Weber bullet: a 22.5-inch-diameter water smoker with 726 sq in across two racks, versus 481 on the 18-inch. The extra diameter matters more than the number suggests, because a full packer brisket lies flat on the 22 and has to be bent or trimmed on the 18. The bigger charcoal ring also holds enough fuel for a genuine overnight burn, which is the reason competition teams standardised on this size.