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OUR STORY
Lisa and I used to spend our free time vacationing with friends. We knew nothing about competition barbecue!
One day Lisa came across this little smoker at a thrift store and picked it up as an extra birthday gift. We had no idea what she'd just started.
Our good friends Rick and Sherri, award winning competitors in Kansas City, tried our Ribs and said we should compete.
Not knowing what to expect and with obviously no idea how to pack, we headed off to our first competition.
Came home dirty, exhausted, and hurting from sleeping on bench seats of our van, but we had an incredible time and met all kinds of great people.
We placed 3rd in Ribs against a lot of much better teams and when we heard our names called and walked up to the stage, we were hooked!
We soon upgraded to a small 4X8 cargo trailer. After a year of crawling in and out of that thing we knew we needed an easier way to compete.
Our answer? An ice cream truck from Craigslist. We turned it into a barbecue truck. When we first brought it home, kids chased us down the road looking for ice cream.
We get funny looks when we pull into an event and usually have to explain that we are competitors, not food truck vendors.
When my brother Adam first saw it, he dubbed it the "superlab" and predicted it would be a game changer. He was right.
Our prep area finally organized under one roof, we walked away with the Grand Championship in 2 out of our first 3 events in the new truck!
Our close friends and neighbors Danny and Jesse would tag along with us occasionally in years past, but got officially bit by the bug in 2017 and joined our team. Lisa and I are thrilled and both have already contributed heavily to our success this year.
Our trusted Webers have brought us a lot of awards over the years and turned out tons of great barbecue over at contests, events, and family dinners.
At contests, we usually brought a smoker for each meat (Brisket, Pork, Ribs, and Chicken). The results were phenomenal, but we are getting too old to keep loading and unloading them all onto our truck at each contest!
In 2018, we added a new weapon to our ever growing family of smokers - The Shotgun Smoker.
We love it so much we even created the Fans of the BBQ Guru Shotgun Smoker site!
The Shotgun turns out the same great quality barbecue for us that the Webers do, and with it's "cabinet" style we can load all our competition meat into one cooker now!
In it's maiden year, it's already brought us a FIRST PLACE BRISKET and FIRST PLACE RIBS along with other awards.
Love our Shotgun Smoker!
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