It was a convenient way to add flavor and smoke. The wood chip feeder system on the Monolith, a narrow compartment on the side of the BBQ, allows you to add more pellets as needed without removing the meat, lifting hot racks, and dropping them in through the top. We placed some mesquite charcoal in the bottom of the grill and then added cherry wood pellets to the mix for extra flavor. It turned out that the rub - and the waiting for the meat to season - was the hardest part. We put a rub on the meat the night before, and woke up early to smoke up the Monolith for the first time.
The monolith game beast full#
We decided to test the smoker feature out first, with a full chicken and a rack of pork ribs being the guinea pigs. While there are lots of Kamado-style grills out there, few combine that ancient style of cooking with technology. The Monolith brings Kamado-style cooking with a modern twist, as the model we tested came with a CyberQ Cloud for temperature monitoring via Wi-Fi. In fact, it’s been around for thousands of years in Japan and China. You can cook almost anything with this bad boy. For example, it comes with a pizza stone, a stainless-steel grill grate, and three more extension grates for stacking items on top of one another. Upon setup, you’ll realize just how much this barbecue and smoker can do. Once you get over the heft of the barbecue itself, you’ll find that the instructions for putting it together are clear, and the pieces fit together well. Putting this thing together is a two-person job that will take at least an hour. The ceramic parts, the top in particular, are heavy. Speaking of space, you also might want to leave yourself some to set it up, as it has lots of parts that needs to come together. Once the delivery person plops it down and leaves your house, you aren’t going to be able to move the box again, so make sure it’s as close to where you plan to set it up as possible. It’s a Kamado-style grill, which means the components are made of ceramic, and they’re very heavy. The approximately five-foot-tall box this barbecue and smoker comes in is heavy and huge, and the components are many.
Putting the beast togetherįirst, a warning about the Monolith. We decided we couldn’t wait any longer and pulled it out for a grill and a smoke. We’ve had the Monolith BBQ Guru Edition with CyberQ Cloud ($1,600) holed up and ready to test for a while, just begging to be used. Here in the Pacific Northwest, where most of the Digital Trends staff lives, barbecue season falls mostly in the summertime - although we realize many of you are lucky enough to live in places where the season can last all year long. If you’re like us, you begin dreaming about meat sizzling on the barbecue long before it’s grill season.