Hunsaker Vortex 55 Gallon Drum Smoker

The competition drum: a full 55-gallon barrel with three grate positions, two welded air-adjusting intake pipes and an adjustable exhaust, finished in a coating rated to 1000°F rather than ordinary powder coat. Unlike the Pit Barrel, this one is meant to be dialled - the intakes and the stack are both adjustable and there is a fixed 3-inch Tel-Tru-style dial in the centre of the lid. It arrives fully assembled on a pallet with a caster kit, which is why it weighs 130 lbs boxed. The Sizzle 55G at $1,399 is the same drum with a gloss finish and logo plate.

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.

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.

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.