Weber Reveals New Searwood Smart Pellet Grill, But Have They Learned From Their Mistakes?

Joe ClementsApril 15, 2024April 16, 2024

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After lots of rumors, Weber officially announced their new Searwood smart pellet grill at CES 2024 in Las Vegas.

The new lineup includes the Searwood 600 ($899) with 648 square inches of grilling space and the Searwood XL 600 ($1,199) with 972 square inches. That price is better than the current 2nd Gen SmokeFire, although you do give up a tiny bit of space.

The Searwood is replacing the SmokeFire, so we’re excited to see if Weber has learned from all the teething issues that grill went went through.

We just got our hands on the Searwood and have made a first look and burnoff video where we share our initial thoughts of this grill.

Weber Searwood Key Features

• Versatile Temperature Control: Offers a full temperature range from 180° to 600°F ideal for smoking and searing.
• DirectFlame™ Cooking Technology: Ensures bold, flavorful sear marks and delicious golden browning for a superior cooking experience.
• Full grate sear zone: Allowing for more food to be cooked directly on the flame, enhancing flavor and efficiency.
• Advanced Heating System: Equipped with Rapid React™ PID technology, the grill heats up quickly (in 15 minutes or less) and efficiently regains temperature after the lid is opened.
• Smoke Boost: Allows you to increase smoky flavor

Weber’s shakey history with pellet grills

Way back in 2020, Weber shocked the grilling world with the release of their first pellet grill. It would seem that dominating the gas and charcoal grill market wasn’t enough, especially with the explosive growth of pellet grills.

After much fanfare, the original SmokeFire was a colossal letdown.

If you bought the Gen 1, you likely suffered from several design flaws, from the faulty app to pellets failing to slide down the hopper. Oh, and there were the grills that caught fire…

With subsequent versions, Weber fixed these issues, and the SmokeFire eventually became one of our recommend pellet grills.

What we’re excited to see on the Weber Searwood

One of the most interesting features with the New Searwood is a new mode for cooking with the lid open.

After setting to lid open mode, rather than setting a grill temperature like you normally would you set an intensity level from 1-10. This could be a good way to improve the versatility of the grill.

We’re also interested to see how they’ve redesigned the grease and ash management system. It appears that the flavorizer bars are gone, so fingers crossed Weber has learned their lesson.

Both grills are currently listed on the Weber website as “available to order soon”, and we’ll update this with more information once we have it.