Introducing Memphis Grills Beale Street

Meet the Memphis Grills Beale Street pellet grill.

We had the opportunity to interview Rick from Memphis Grills about their new Beale Street pellet grill at the Hearth, Patio and Barbecue Expo. What follows is the text from that interview. You can also catch the interview on our YouTube channel.

Hey, David here, and Addison, with The Barbecue Lab. Bringing you the best outdoor cooking gear and techniques to help you win your weekend.

Pellet grill cooking has made a huge in-road with backyard cooks across the world by combining the flavor of wood cooking with the convenience of digital temperature control.

The stainless steel grills offered by Memphis Wood Fire Grills occupy the top of the pellet grill category. Today, we’re going to get an in depth look at the new Beale Street pellet grill.

Hey, I’m here with Rick from Memphis Wood Fire Grills, and Rick tell us a little bit about this new model, the Beale Street that you guys are just releasing right now.

Thanks David, really appreciate the opportunity to talk about the Beale
Street Grills from Memphis Wood Fire Grills. We’re super excited to be here at HPBA. It’s our 10th anniversary at this show.

We were the original pellet grill company to pioneer high performance in the category. So this unit here is our built-in model. Very easy for installation. Controller on the front here, all stainless steel construction.

Our hopper is on the front, it’s going to hold twelve pounds of pellets. All stainless inside. Check the grates out. Those are pretty heavy. “Wow, that’s weighty.” Heavy duty stainless steel grates there.

I’ve got three grills on my deck. A little bit much, but it’s a lot of fun. I’m never gonna have to replace the grates, they’re that robust. Temperature rage from the grill is 180 degrees all the way up to 550 degrees.

So, from 180 to 295 degrees that grill is automatically in smoke mode. So, basically you’re going to have a fire burning inside, thats going to be controlled by the digital controller here and it’s going to be the fans will actually bellow on and off as you’re reaching and maintaining your temperature.

This probe inside the cooking chamber is taking that temperature every couple of seconds and the algorithm that we have built into the controller basically monitors the cooking surface one inch above the grates so that we have consistent control year-around.

Doesn’t matter what kind of inclement weather you’re cooking in. We’re up in the Midwest I’m in Wisconsin, and I can go, out turn the grill on to 180 degrees, it could be -10 degrees outside and I can put my pork shoulders on it does a phenomenal job. Very consistent.

And with this controller, I mean you actually have an app that goes with the controller as well, right?

Yeah, absolutely. We’ve got a cloud based app that will allow you to stay on the couch watching the game but basically you’ve got the ability to monitor temperature, your probe temperatures. I can receive text messages or emails and notifications on what is taking place inside my grill.

Now with this controller, are we talking about a PID controller or is this one a different type? Yep, it’s a PID based controller. It’s our own proprietary innovation and engineering that’s gone into it. There’s a lot that goes into that to be able to create a cooking chamber that’s consistent temperature wise. This is actually more accurate than ovens in a home.

Wow, now and talk to me about this because it looks like what we would normally call a diverter plate, and this actually has a dual slope to it. So, talk to me a little bit about what what this is, unique to the Memphis Grill.

Great question. So, essentially we’ve got cooking range from 180 to 550 and it’s going to be in-direct while you’re doing it. So, one of my favorite things that I cook on the grill is bacon. So, I use a frog mat and lay my strips of bacon out put it right on my grates, and I don’t have to worry about a grease fire because our savorizers are actually tented, so it’s gonna push the grease off to the sides.

Our drawer down here holds a couple of 9 by 13 foil pans where that is collected. It keeps it safe, there isn’t a bucket hanging off the grill that the dogs love, right?

Our Genie tool here is a great compliment to the grill itself. You’re going to be able to scrape your grates, but you’re going to be able to move your grates out of the way if you want to change your cooking mode.

If you want to come in and take a quick shot we can take a quick look at the burn pot here. This is where all the heat and fire comes from inside the grill.

When you turn the grill on, the fan comes on, the igniter comes on, superheated air is going to go over the pellets for about a minute. About three minutes into it we’re gonna get fire in the burn pot, and we can get to 375 degrees in about 10-12 minutes. We can be at max temperature in another five minutes. Super, super easy and consistent.

I’ve got our direct flame insert here, so it’s perforated. So, if you want to do open flame cooking, we can go to our max temperature on this grill to 550, and then hit the up arrow and we’ll go into open flame mode and in that mode, we’re actually bypassing our temp sensor inside, we’re going to a straight duty feed cycle for low-medium or low-medium-high on our other models.

Wow, so it does a great job being able to grill and char and put a nice crust on a steak or chop. Ultimate versatility.

All right, so Rick, I’m looking inside this pellet hopper and I see a vertical
auger. Tell me how this grill is gonna feed pellets inside. Yeah, exactly
What we’ve got here is we have our auger positioned so that we’re gonna be driving pellets up and they’ll fall down the ramp into the burn pot.

It’s a safety feature. We want to be able to separate our fuel from fire, and this allows the grill be able to feed pellets, maintain temperature, and you’re not gonna have any kind of a situation where you can have a burn back and have any kind of fire to go back into the hopper itself.

So, it’s gonna actually auger them up and it’s going to take them how through the grill here? So, if you get a shot in here, you can see the the chute that the pellets get augered up to, and then it drops them into the burn pot here, and there’s a gap between the two so that there isn’t any connection between the fire and the pellet chamber.

All right Rick, so tell me about this probe cable. It’s not often I see a probe that looks like it could be a guitar cable for a grill. It looks robust. Tell me about this. Well, the challenge with probes is it’s typically a kind of wear and tear type of item, so we really wanted to have something robust, something that’s going to last a long time. And after several versions we ended up with this configuration here.

But we’ve got three jacks right here so you can have up to three meet probes in the grill at any one time and be able to monitor those temperatures and this does a nice job of doing that for you. It’s gonna accurately relay your temperature reading to you.

The grill itself you know we’ve got a convection fan in here. It’s going to be pulling air in from the front, and basically pushing into the air box where the burn pot is, and it’s going to tumble that air through and vent out the back. So, we have true convection consistency. So I can cook chicken here, here, here and get the same result anywhere in the cooking chamber.

These are stainless grills, and they come in a couple of different flavors of stainless, right? Yeah, so David that’s correct. We’ve got grills in both 430 stainless steel and 304 stainless.

So, Rick you showed us the built-in but this also comes in a cart
version as well, right? Absolutely. Right here’s the cart version. Very robust, nice clean lines, it’s a good lookin grill. Storage underneath here. We’ve got our ash and grease pans on the side.

We’ve got a little nice Wi-Fi connection here. Is that what’s going to connect us to the app? Exactly. so when you get your grill, you’re gonna set it up. Setup is very easy. You’re gonna connect to your home network. And then you’re gonna connect your app to the grill, and basically the communication from the grill goes to the cloud and your app connects to the cloud, and you get your information that way.

I can do almost everything, but starting it up, probably not? Can’t start it up, safety reasons right? Yep, safety reasons. That would be the time my wife brings out the patio, pushes to grill under the deck, puts the gas can from the mower on the shelf, so we don’t want that, but you can
control the temperature of the grill, you turn the grill off if you want, I get
text messages and I travel a fair amount.

I know 375, my wife is cooking chicken at home. That’s great, well hey Rick, this has been a pleasure to be able to get and get to know more about the Beale Street grill and to experience Memphis Wood Fire Grills. Why don’t you tell people where can they find out more information.

MemphisGrills.com – All of our product content out there, blog, recipes, a lot of really good information. Recipes and lots of stuff to share on our website.

Cool, well hey Rick, it has been pleasure. We look forward to hearing more from Memphis Grills.

Thanks so much David, appreciate it.

Question of the day: have you ever cooked with a pellet grill in your outdoor cooking journey?

Let us know in the comments section below as well as your thoughts on the new Beale Street unit that’s just now hitting the market.

And if you want to check out some of our other coverage from the Barbecue Expo, we’ve got a whole playlist out.