Hey guys,
I'm still on the road for a family wedding so I'm sorry I'm not able to reply to every question. I'll try to hit the highlights.
Regarding smoking. They talked alot about the things they did to get a better smoke flavor. There were some design things (which frankly I can't remember right now) but alot of what they did was tweak their pellets to include a higher percentage of flavor wood vs BTU wood. They also have at least one blend which includes a limited percentage of bark in an effort to ramp up the smoke profile. In their testing they found it really helped.
The main reason I don't have video on smoking is because we weren't there long enough to do a live cooking demonstration. We spent most of the 4 hours of time at Weber HQ talking about the development of the grill and what all went into it and the hands on time was basically grilling our lunch before we headed back to the airport.
That's why they decided to smoke the brisket the day before we got there so we could at least try it. Obviously, I only tried it once, but I really enjoyed the brisket and I found the smoke profile to be fine. You wouldn't confuse it with a stick burner but nobody would complain that it's missing anything.
Regarding Grilling...The reason they focused on grilling is because that was the key thing they were trying to deliver because every pellet grill they tested was at least a passable smoker. They wanted this to be a easy to use, quality grill that didn't require a lot of compromises and they didn't want to have to add or remove parts to make it work.
Regarding the performance. It reminds me of cooking with my genesis. About the same level of sear, about the same level of flair ups and about the same level evenness. You can see the cooler part on the side (by the way, I put that in there SO you could see that.) But keep in mind, what you are also seeing is that most of the grate was fairly even heat...and it was a HUGE grate. That was a 36 inch cooker. The fact they were able to get that as even and hot as they did was impressive to me.
Alot of what went into this grill are things you can't see. It's designed to eliminate or minimize a lot of the common problems people have with pellet grills...some of which people don't even necessarily realize is an inconvenience because they have just accepted it as par for the course.
So the auger is build in such a way where it's almost impossible to jam or backburn into the hopper...some of that is the length and the upward angle but also in part because during shut down mode it all the pellets at the end go into the pot and then the auger goes in reverse and pulls the new ones away from the fire.
As I touched on earlier, there are no parts required to go in or out in order to sear vs smoke so you don't have to store them when not in use.
Any grill can have a grease fire but they did a lot of work to make it much less likely with this one. There are fewer places for grease to accumulate and less ash floating through the cooker due to the design of the fire pot (which also keeps fly ash off the food...another goal). Additionally its really easy to clean so people are more likely to actually do it. One of the things that they felt like was a headache was having to having to remove a huge drip pan and pull ou a shop vac to clean the grill so they engineered that out of the equation by making all the inerds slope into the catch pan. It will ship with a tool were anything that does accumulate can easily be pushed below without a shop vac.
Also, its safety rated where if the grill ever does have a "thermal event" it's designed to manage it safely without hurting your property...and it should not even damage the grill itself (advantage of the porcelain coated steel vs painted)
The glow rods take 5 minutes to replace.
The grill is rated to operate safely at a 15 degree angle so basically it's not tip able even with all the weight on the back.
The computer is big, visible, user friends, and one handed operable so you. Ergonomics was a big consideration in that design.
The body is porcelain coated and the sides which are aluminized steel are high heat paint AND have an internal baffle wall so they are air insulated to protect that paint. Basically very unlikely to rust.
The hopper is specifically 23 pounds so you can add a full 20 pound bag of pellets without having a tiny bag of leftovers laying around.
There's more but that's the stuff I can think of off the top of my head. Mostly what i was impressed by was just how much testing goes into this stuff. The mind boggles. To put it into perspective, they have one person who comes in & practices every recipe in one of their cookbooks to make sure there are no tweaks they need to make to accommodate the grill with those recipes. That's JUST the culinary testing and that comes after all the hundreds of test runs during development. They've gone through tons and tons of pellets and measured every spot on the grill and they've pushed it to the breaking point in every way they could think of to find ways to make in better safer and easier to use.
I doubt it's "perfect" because nothing is but this is definitely not a grill that is using it's customers as beta testers (those are my words, not theirs.) In fact, it's worth noting that i never heard them say one bad thing about any other company. Also, for some reason I expected them to be arrogant but they weren't that way at all. Very professional folks.
