Oklahoma Joe's Highland Reverse Flow Smoker BBQ

The ash drop bucket rusted off of my Ol’ Blue Wood Fired BBQ Grill that I’ve had for decades. The lid handle and wheels sun baked off a decade ago. The wind threw it off the 14 foot high rock slope in my back yard and cracked the porcelain lid coating a decade ago. She's not being thrown out. I cut the bottom out of a Christmas popcorn tin and laid it over the hole.

Ol' Blue

I’ve been looking at Offset BBQ/Smokers for years. Call me cheap, but I would not buy one until I needed a new wood fired BBQ. I looked at the biscuit and pellet BBQ/Smokers. They don’t add as much smoke flavor as I like because they burn so clean. 

I don’t like the taste of burned propane gas in my food. Yes, Ethyl Mercaptan has a smell when it is burned and makes food stink. Even the propane companies are looking for a new safety additive that doesn’t burn dirty or stinky. 35 years ago I had a gas smoker that was given to me and I gave away after the 1^st use.

So, a new chapter begins after much research and deliberation. I bought at Oklahoma Joe’s Highland Reverse Flow Wood BBQ Smoker at Flagstaff Sportsman’s Warehouse and the storage cover. It was fully assembled and four employees removed the smoke stack and laid it down on a packing blanket in the bed of the Power Wagon. 

The directions for seasoning the BBQ, say, to brush down the interior (un-painted) surfaces with vegetable oil. It looked like it had already been coated so I didn’t bother. We washed the grills instead of leaving them in the BBQ as directed by Oklahoma Joe’s.

I took my Stihl Battery Chainsaw MSA 120 into my back acreage to harvest a 5 gallon bucket of dead mesquite. 4200 feet in elevation is near the highest level that it grows in Arizona. About 10% of my 200 trees are mesquite.

I loaded most of it in the offset basket and lit a pile of fine mesquite twigs with larger twigs on top that I put on the access door side of the basket. For years, I've used an electric starter to start Ol’ Blue. I never use paper or starter fluid.

I was happy to see that the mesquite in the offset was able to bring the temperature of the grill, after going around the reverse flow pans, to 475*F. I would probably never cook at that level, but it tells me that it works very well and I won’t need to use tons of wood. I saw door clamps installed on some reverse flow smokers. It doesn’t look like they will be needed on the Oklahoma Joe's Highland Reverse Flow Smoker. It's fairly air tight already. The hinge side of the door is where some smoke was escaping.

I saw several reviews with pictures of the paint peeling off from the heat. I’m not sure why they don’t use Stove Paint. Well, like everyone else, the paint on the top of the offset peeled completely off.

So, Instead of sniveling, I removed the warming shelf and handle.

I cleaned the damaged paint off and painted it with Stove Paint that everyone that heats their home with wood stoves in the back-country already has.

It took me 30 minutes total and is a little more flat – luster than the factory paint, but it will stay on.

Where I live, when you buy a new rifle you skim and pillar bed the action, float the barrel, replace the trigger and mount a scope on it that cost more than the rifle.

We bought a brand new Power Wagon 4X4 6.4 Hemi 2500 Truck 3 years ago, replaced the tires with real off-road tires and sold the factory supplied shoes to a flat-lander with a mall-crawler who writes an article in a major magazine about the great tires he got for 20% off.

I give the Oklahoma Joe's Highland Reverse Flow Smoker a 5 Star Rating and will recommend it to my friends. And, when they taste the table fare from it they’ll be buying one too when their Ol’ Blue breaks.

I could have bought or made a similar BBQ/Smoker Reverse flow, but it would have been double or more the cost.