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- Trademarked Fast Flame Ignition System quickly and easily lights coals
- Intuitive electronic controls let your effortlessly operate the patent-pending rotisserie
- Convenient storage for rotisserie rod and grill lid, which doubles as a heat shield
- Wide, flat fire box provides as even heat as you can hope for with charcoal
- Powder-coated steel exterior protects against the elements and corrosion
Everdure reimagined what a charcoal grill could be, and the results impressed us at every turn.
With the help of visionary Michelin-Star Chef Heston Blumenthal, Everdure created a grill that pushes technological boundaries yet still stays true to the simplicity of charcoal cooking. There’s no better example of that combination than Everdure’s patent-pending Rotiscope Technology rotisserie — all it takes is the push of a button to control the built-in rotisserie for more customized roasting. We found plenty more to love about the Everdure HUB II charcoal grill, from its quality and design to a surprising degree of performance and collection of thoughtful features developed with backyard chefs in mind.
To get a better sense of everything the HUB II has to offer, we let Chef Tony loose to test it out in every way he could imagine. He paired a scientific approach with real-world cook sessions to paint a clear picture of the quality, performance, and features you should expect from this Everdure model. A summary of his findings: “If you’re the entertainer that loves to use charcoal, you owe it to yourself to check out Everdure’s HUB II.”
Quality:
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The entire exterior of the HUB II is made from powder-coated steel, which offers solid protection against both the elements and corrosion over time. That left a good impression on Chef Tony, who dug deeper into this grill’s quality by taking calipers to different components to measure their thickness. The cart body measured 14-gauge steel, as did the firebox (bonus points for its porcelain-enamel coating that provides an extra bit of heat retention). The steel lid came in at 18-gauge, while the perforated tray that sits above the Fast Flame ignitor proved to be 20-gauge, 304 stainless steel. Finally, Chef Tony recorded the chrome cooking grates at 16 millimeters of thickness. Overall, it’s about what we’d expect from a Premium charcoal grill.
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Chef Tony was quite pleased to find the powder-coated cart doors were double-walled, giving them a sturdy feel in a market where flimsy cart doors are all too common. In fact, the same can be said for the integrated rotisserie system and its heavy-duty components. Everdure backs up its quality construction with a solid warranty: 10 years of rust-through and burn-through coverage for the outer body, burners, hood, and cart, along with 5 years for the exterior paint and finish against rust-through.
Performance:
Chef Tony will be the first to admit it: he had some doubts about the HUB II’s performance before testing. Foremost among them was if the stay-cool handles attached to the grill grates would actually stay cool. Much to Chef Tony’s shock, they did. That pattern repeatedly played out during testing, leaving our grill expert pleasantly surprised with just about every aspect of the HUB II’s performance.
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We’ll start with the rotisserie because that’s probably where you would. It can indeed handle 88 pounds of food as advertised, but the true measure of any rotisserie is its rotation. This one spins extremely smoothly, with no hitches or hesitations that could cause food to flop or trussing to come loose. As if that wasn’t enough to earn an A+ grade from Chef Tony, he was able to switch the built-in rotisserie columns to any of their 3 heights while the food and rod were in place. Mark that down as another unexpected development in Everdure’s favor.
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While the rotisserie gives the Everdure HUB II its “wow” factor, the grill itself deserves praise for how evenly it distributes heat. Traditional kettle grills fail to do this well — gravity pulls coals to the center of their round bodies, making it harder to spread them where desired and thereby limiting heat control. The HUB II, however, has a wide, flat grilling area that gives grillers the chance to spread the coals as uniformly as possible. Based on Chef Tony’s cooking tests, the heat followed suit with surprising evenness across the cooking surface. (Wondering why we didn’t hook up thermocouples to the grates for a precise reading? Hear it from Chef Tony himself: “The data would be inconsistent because it would depend on how much and where you place the charcoal. And even if you lay the coals out evenly, it’s still a natural product. Each coal burns slightly differently, so you wouldn’t be able to prove much with thermocouples on a live fire.”)
Features:
Charcoal grills are usually no-frills cookers, but the Everdure HUB II went above and beyond to provide home chefs with genuinely useful features. Take the grill lid, for instance. It seems ordinary enough, but when placed on the rear-facing bracket, the lid acts as both a windbreaker for the coals and a heat shield for grillers loading or unloading the rotisserie. Chef Tony wasn’t sure how effective the lid-shield would be, but he was happy to report it made standing near the grill much more bearable than normal.
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Of course, the rotisserie powered by Everdure’s patent-pending Rotiscope Technology is the HUB II’s most notable feature. Chef Tony came away impressed with not only its performance as discussed above, but also with its ultimate convenience and ease of use. A slick, simple control panel runs the entire setup, with a button for the rotisserie motor accompanied by up and down arrows to set the built-in columns to any of 3 different positions above the coal bed. The only other button on the minimal control panel is for the Fast Flame Ignition System, which operates through an electric heating element in the center of the grill for effortless charcoal-lighting. All told, Chef Tony found the electronic controls to be highly intuitive.
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After overcoming his surprise at Everdure’s cool-to-the-touch grate handles living up to their name, Chef Tony successfully used them to add charcoal and wood chips mid-cook, which can be a hassle on other grills. A few other features that earned recognition from our expert: a slide-out storage shelf/warming area inside the cart, a side cabinet dedicated to storage of the rotisserie rod and forks, and a pair of locking casters for easy mobility. But it was perhaps the most unassuming detail — an auto-retracting power cord with colored bands to notify you that you shouldn’t pull any further — that drove home just how much care Everdure put into perfecting the HUB II charcoal grill. On second thought, we’re not sure what else we should’ve expected from a grill so obviously built with the user in mind.
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