Other than the notoriously poorly designed Kamado Joe cover (what were/are you guys thinking?), this is the only other product from Kamado Joe that I think is less than excellent. The grills themselves are amazing, and are, in my opinion, not just the best ceramic grill on the market, but the best value as well. Their customer support is also awesome -- I had to replace the top vent about 9 months ago, and it was a super simple no questions asked process. The Big Joe Joetisserie, though, is another story. If you're like me, you anxiously awaited its release for nearly a year. I bought it about 8 weeks ago, and have, so far, only done two cooks -- the first was a successful pork butt, but the 2nd was a near-disastrous turkey for Thanksgiving a few weeks back. The good: - It's a basic rotisserie, and will likely be fine for most applications - It will fit your Big Joe. In fact, it's the only rotisserie that will fit your Big Joe, so it's your only choice if you want a rotisserie The not so good: - It costs $300, but its motor is definitely not a $300 rotisserie motor, which is a problem since people who bought the Big Joe bought it to cook Big Food (or lots of food). I have a Weber kettle with a Weber rotisserie that was half the price, and the motor for the Weber felt better than the Kamado Joe one. How much can you tell from "feel", you might ask? Well, a rotisserie is a simple household electric motor with some gears, and an electric motor like the Joetisserie gets its twisting force (its torque) from three fundamental areas -- 1) strength of the permanent magnet, 2) amount of loops in its coil, and 3) the amount of current sent through the coil wire. Permanent magnet strength is proportional to the size of the magnet unless we're talking rare earth metals like neodymium alloy or a superconducting environment -- neither of which is the case here -- and the more wire used in a coil, the greater the weight. I've not taken the motor apart to look at the interior, but I would not be overly surprised to find plastic gearing. The Joetisserie's motor is *very* light, and it was immediately noticeable upon unboxing. - The product packaging says it's rated for a 50-lb load. Naturally, that means a *balanced* 50-lb load. Some meats are easy to balance - say, for example, a large beef roast. Other meats are really hard/impossible to balance - like a chicken or a turkey. This is a $300 rotisserie though -- it needs to be able to handle unbalanced loads to be worth the money. Unfortunately, it doesn't. I cooked a 20-lb turkey for Thanksgiving a few weeks ago, and the load was definitely unbalanced. I did my best to balance the load, but it wasn't possible. I would estimate the load was at about a 65/35 split. Now, this is a pretty significant imbalance, and a cheap rotisserie motor would likely be unable to spin it. Sure enough, the Joetisserie was able to spin it once, and then just kept swinging the heavy part of the load back and forth as it would reverse direction over and over. Unfortunately for me, I did not realize this for about 5 minutes since I closed the lid as soon as I saw it spin the load once. Had I not checked a few minutes later, I would have had a burnt breast and and under-cooked thigh and back, and Thanksgiving dinner would have been a bummer. To the Kamado Joe grill's credit, it only took a couple minutes to get the turkey off of the Joetisserie and to get the grill set up for indirect heat, so we ended up with a really good semi-smoked turkey. - The lid closes, but just barely, and I'm concerned about resulting stress on the hinge as well as the weak seal toward the front of the grill. The problem is that the back of the lid meets the back of the Joetisserie ring while still a few inches away from closing at the front of the ring. The lid will still close, but the back part of the ring is just too high to make this a great fit. The Kamado Joe team can reduce the height of the ring at the back without sacrificing rigidity by increasing the size of the wall that extends into the grill, so this is fixable. - The way the ring is constructed, you cannot leave the divide and conquer rack in place when using the Joetisserie. This matters because you're going to want to catch drippings so you don't have a complete disaster of a mess at the bottom of your grill, and the best way to do this is to put a pan on a heat deflector beneath your meat. Unfortunately, this is not possible, so you end up using the grill divider heat plate, and rigging some tinfoil on the front half of the grill where there is no fire. This works, but it's an inconvenience that becomes quite a mess if you have a lot of fluids coming off during your cook, such as from basting, from an injected meat, or from a fatty cut of meat. Were the Kamado Joe team to modify their design and make some relatively small cut-outs in the ring, then they may be able to address this. Verdict: I would buy this again if given the chance, but not for $300. There's no excuse for such a weak motor in such an expensive product, and the ring needs a couple modifications to make this a great product worthy of the premium price. For a company that has nailed the market for ceramic grills, and has done so while beating the incumbent's price, quality, and features, I'm really surprised the Joetisserie isn't a better product.
