An AI-Enabled Pellet Grill Is a Dumb Idea. Buy This One Anyway

Grills don’t need AI, but you might need an AI grill. When it debuted at CES early this year, the Brisk It Zelos-450 was advertised as being “the first grill with generative AI.” That AI comes in the form of “Vera,” an in-app feature that “creates customized recipes based on your input” and then sets the grill’s temperature to cook them.

The tech press enthusiastically reported on the device early this year. I was less optimistic, which is why it took me the better part of the year to finally free the grill from its disintegrating cardboard box—something I finally did last week. AI is notoriously bad at recipes (unless you’re a glue pizza aficionado), and who needs a recipe for a burger or steak? Since the grill can’t physically stop the cook and pull your meat off the grates, what’s the real difference between an authoritative AI voice telling you your food is done and a temp alert from the probe? And yet, the Zelos is a great buy, especially when priced below $300 during an end-of-season sale. This Wi-Fi-enabled pellet grill has a great design and features you won’t find on grills double or more its price.

I have only briefly played with the Vera AI feature, which I found unhelpful. When I prompted it to give me a recipe for “coffee rubbed ribs with tequila sauce,” it simply added coffee to a standard rib rub recipe, and then added tequila to a standard barbecue sauce, in equal proportion to the ketchup. ( I did not prepare this recipe, but it certainly appeared to be way too much tequila.) When I used the photo-based personalized recipe recommendation tool to give me a recipe from a photo of ground meat, dill pickles, mustard, and eggs, Vera informed me that “the image content is unrelated to cooking on a wood pellet grill.” D’oh. However, the grill doesn’t need AI to be a winner.

If I were looking to score a great Black Friday deal on a pellet smoker or small backyard grill, the Zelos-450 would be my choice. Here’s why.

Courtesy of Brisk It

Brisk It

Zelos-450 Smart Grill

It’s well-packaged and easy to assemble. Take it from someone who has tested a half-dozen grills for WIRED—too many are beasts to assemble, coming with 100-plus screws and confusing instructions. I’ve lost an entire Saturday to grill assembly, which is a big part of the reason this grill was sitting in the box it came in for about eight months. The ease of assembly was a pleasant surprise. Every part of the Zelos was clearly labeled, and the instructions were clear. It went from the box to a break-in burn within 90 minutes, and could have been done under an hour with more diligence.

It’s quite stylish (for a grill). Brisk It ain’t putting Thaan or Nomad out of business, but I defy you to find a grill that looks this good at this price—especially a full-featured smart grill. It has a minimalist design with clean lines and a few appropriate flourishes of stainless steel trim. The pellet hopper, grease trap, and wheels all work as expected. There’s only one control knob, which does everything you need it to do.

Brisk It App via Martin Cizmar

It has a powerful and effective app. Grill control apps tend to exist on a spectrum between frustratingly glitchy and totally unusable. The Brisk It app is dead simple, totally intuitive, and has worked flawlessly on every occasion I’ve used it. To automatically light the grill, you slide a bar on the app to the right. You are cautioned to do this only while standing next to the grill, but I decided to take an extreme risk for science and lit the grill from my bed, as I might if I were getting up before dawn to smoke two racks of 3-2-1 ribs to be served at the kickoff of a noon football game. You can set the temperature for the grill and plug in a probe to get alerts when whatever you’re cooking reaches the desired internal temperature. When it comes time to turn the grill off, you just slide the same bar to the left and wait 20 minutes for the fire to die. These are features not found on much more expensive grills—the MasterBuilt Gravity Series 1150 we name a budget pick, is in fact nearly quadruple the price and doesn’t have automatic ignition. You can use any brand of wood pellets in its 12-pound-capacity hopper.

There are a few downsides.

This grill is on the small side. Speaking of two racks of ribs—that’s about all you’ve got room for. The marketing copy advertises room for 15 burgers, but I would comfortably cook six burgers on it, maybe eight, but never 10. You could make dinner for a family of four on this grill, but you will not be making a whole brisket for a party.