Contest Recap: Smoke on the Water

This past weekend our competition team, Burnt Finger BBQ, took to the road to compete in North Little Rock, AR at the Smoke on the Water barbecue contest. With a guaranteed prize pool of $100,000.00, the world’s richest barbecue contest drew many of the top teams from across the country, including a few of those familiar faces recently featured on TLC’s recent hit TV show BBQ Pitmasters.

Immediately upon pulling into the parking lot we unloaded our trailer and hoisted a brand new banner sporting the logos our newest sponsor Iron City Brewery. Big thanks to those guys for supporting our barbecue team, and also contributing to our beer consumption habits at a contest!

Smoke on the Water turned out to be a fantastic contest for our team. Not only did we get to introduce the competition barbecue world to Iron City Lager and IC Light, but we also had beautiful weather for a majority of the weekend. While our hometown of Kansas City was getting pounded by a winter storm, we were kicking back in our lawn chairs enjoying the clear blue sky and 70 degree temperatures. Although the weather did turn on us just before the awards ceremony, the rain couldn’t dampen our excitement as we heard our team name called for 3 awards at a contest with 227 teams competing for top honors!!! Here’s the full breakdown of our placement.

Chicken: 32nd
Ribs: 13th
Pork: 8nd
Brisket: 221st
Overall: 103rd

In addition to the standard KCBS categories, the event also hosted an auxiliary sauce contest. We offered up our official Burnt Finger BBQ Private Stock Barbecue Sauce to the judges and came away with a fantastic 13th place finish up against some of the most popular barbecue sauces on the market.

Huge congrats are due to Pellet Envy (2009 KCBS Team of the Year) for taking home the Grand Championship, as well as Cool Smoke (Tuffy Stone from TLC Pitmasters) for Reserve Grand Champion honors! The full results can be seen over on the KCBS website.