Two popular charcoal grill choices are kettle grills and Kamado grills. Kettle grills don’t retain heat well, while Kamado grills are a little more expensive and can be fragile.

Spider Grills’ new Huntsman charcoal grill is engineered to be the best of both worlds. It combines the ease of a kettle grill with the heat retention of a Kamado grill into a new platform. They sent me one so I could see how it works first hand.

Spider Grills was founded on making charcoal grilling easier. They started by making accessories for the Weber kettle to solve its shortcomings. The Huntsman incorporated that problem solving into a ground-up charcoal grilling platform.

It’s made from super thick metal for heat retention and has a digital temperature controller for set it and forget it ease. Between the engineering and quality materials, it gives an overall premium grilling experience.

Features and specs

• Retail price of $999.99 (check price) for the Huntsman and $1,499.99 (check price) for the Giant Huntsman
• 363 square inches of cooking space on the Huntsman, while the larger model has 508
• Built from 5mm thick carbon steel
• Can maintain a temperature range of 150 degrees F to 700 degrees F for smoking or grilling
• Can be controlled with your phone
• Comes with three nice casters to make it easy to move
• A removable ash pan makes cleaning easy
• Has a front access door to add more charcoal

Assembly

The huntsman’s made from thick metal so this grill weighs 190 lbs. You’ll want a friend with you to stand put it together because it’s so burly.

Spider grills did a great job packaging this grill for delivery. They give you a full socket wrench inside of a small tool bag for assembly, which is a really nice touch.

Assembly itself wasn’t difficult but there were a couple of inaccuracies in the instructions to be aware of. There’s a sign on the hinge to not pull out the locking pin until after step 13, but you need to pull out the pin to access the parts shipped inside of the grill to reach step 13.

What I did to deal with this is I was a rebel and removed the pin, unpacked everything, then put the pin back in. The pin was in there pretty tight, so I had to loosen it.

Another minor deviation is the instructions say to bold the Venom Controller onto the grill. It actually attaches with thumb screws, which are easier to use than bolts.

Once it’s together, they give you a nice seasoning kit to season the grill before your first cook. It’s the little things like that that just add to the overall experience. I personally used the seasoning kit, then hit it with some PAM cooking spray to get in all the little nooks.

Starting

You start this grill much like you would any other charcoal grill. You light the charcoal with a chimney or fire starters to get it going.

The Giant Huntman has tons of space inside, so keep that in mind as you’re deciding how much charcoal to use. If you’re high heat grilling across the whole grate surface, you might need more than one chimney, or have a bed of charcoal in the grill.

Once the charcoal is lit, set the controller to your desired temperature. It will tell you how to adjust the vents on the top to get the grill going.

Cooking

With the Huntsman you can cook either manually, like any other charcoal grill, or with the high tech controller. Cooking with temperature control makes the whole operation really easy.

It works by using a fan to blow air into the bed of charcoal to raise or maintain the temperature. You can control it on the controller itself or with the spider grills app, which has a nice interface.

I was impressed with how well it kept temperature. I also like how, despite having good tech, it still gave a proper grilling experience.

My only minor complaint with cooking with the app is you’re limited on how much you can change temperature when you’re away from the grill. You may need to manually adjust the chimney vent setting depending on how much you change it.

That means if you crank up the temperature on the app away from your house, you can’t adjust the vent. It’s not a major problem but you just need to plan your cook accordingly if you’re going to have large temperature changes.

The grill comes with meat probes, so you always know what your food is doing. You can even graph the temperature progression of the grill and your food.

There’s high temp gasket that sits in-between the lid and the body to lock in the heat. It’s nice that it came from the factory like that.

Just be aware that the gasket is pinned onto the grill all around it, which will make it last longer than an adhesive, but it can make the gasket not be perfectly uniform from a visual perspective. That’s super nit-picky but it’s something I noticed.

The premium nature of the grill extends from the outside to the cooking experience. It has laser cut cooking grates that look nice and work well. Also, everything about the grill feels sturdy and gives confidence.

Durability

Looking at this grill, you can tell you could take a bat to it, and it wouldn’t hurt it at all. I unintentionally found out how durable it was while I was testing it.

We had some bad storms and some tornadoes in the area, and the grill took a tumble. Despite its heavyweight, I didn’t have the wheels locked, so it rolled into some stone steps on the side of my house, and fell over. You can see it with a downed tree in my backyard.

After the storm passed, I picked the grill back up while cleaning up my yard. You’d never even notice anything happened to this grill, it still looked and worked flawlessly. That wouldn’t be the case with many other grills.

Accessories

Spider grills offers a full line of accessories for the Huntsman to make cooking easier and more efficient. I tested out the side shelves and the cooking system, both of which I’d recommend. They come in the Essentials Bundle.

The side shelves keep you from needing a table right next to your grill whenever you’re gonna cook. They install easily and feel really sturdy, which is what you want.

The cooking system gives you more ways to cook, and the ability to cook more food at once. It adds a secondary grate level for cooking high heat and low heat at the same time.

It also includes ceramic deflectors for cooking low and slow or indirectly. The quality of the cooking system matches everything else on the grill.

Conclusion

Spider Grills accomplished their mission of the Huntsman by taking the best features of a kettle and a Kamado. Everything about the grill feels premium and gives an overall great experience. From putting it together, through cooking, you can tell it’s a special grill.