DEBBQ Meets The Blog World

{George’s Blog}

Well, Dead End BBQ is entering into the blog world!  This is our first blog of many to come, discussing the art of barbecue, catering and where ever our journey takes us.

Barbecue has been a passion of mine since I was 14 in the backyard with my father on a grill.  Even though it was hamburgers and hot dogs, I got the bug.  I always gravitated towards a grill at any party, either to observe or get advice until I felt that I could command the grill myself.  Mostly I considered myself a backyard grill guy. That was until we started cooking on our Dead End Street.

In February 2000, my wife and I went to dinner with two other couples on our Dead End Street. That night the Dead End Society was formed!  We decided to smoke a whole hog on Memorial Day weekend.  I contacted a friend of mine and borrowed a smoker big enough to cook a whole hog.  Only two of us had ever cooked a whole hog before and the other had cooked a goat. We smoked the hog for 20 hours and had about 50 people come over to eat it with us!  It was a blast!

The next year I purchased a smoker big enough to smoke two hogs at the same time. That was my first big smoker; now I have nine! The second year we got a lot better and by 2002 we decided to enter a contest in Townsend, TN.  We won first place in three categories: Whole Hog, Chicken and Anything Butt (a KCBS category that judges anything except for the 4 main meats); we did a chocolate banana dessert! By 2004 we were the Grand Champions of that event. We thought we were pretty good!

So The Dead End Society went out on the national circuit and got it handed to us!  Our competitors were big time and we had a lot to learn.  Every weekend we would practice the art of barbecue until we finally got it right in 2007.  That was the year we won the State Championship of Tennessee in Cookeville!  

In 2008, we were selected to represent Tennessee at the Jack Daniel's World Invitational BBQ Championship in Lynchburg, TN. There were 11,000 teams overall that year and we finished 44^th in the world.  Our dessert, which was a vanilla bean, chocolate chunk, swirled with Jack Daniels ice cream, sandwiched between chocolate chunk chocolate cookies, finished 9^th in the world. We finished 12^th overall in brisket, 32^nd in chicken, and 36^th in pork. Our ribs were 66^th overall and that was only because there was too much Jack Daniels in the equation at the time the ribs were smoked.

After the Jack, we decided to open our first Dead End BBQ restaurant, which we did in October 2009.  We haven’t been able to do as many contests as we would like, but we will be out there some day soon!  

In the meantime, we have classes every year on the patio to share our knowledge of barbecue with the community. This year, we are having two classes. The first is May 16^th in Maryville, which is a beginner’s class and the other on June 20^th in Knoxville, which is a more advanced class. Click here to sign up. Hope to see you soon!

-George