I Tried the BioLite FirePit+ and Now I Grill and Chill In the Year 3000

Ah, connecting with nature—truly one of the great pleasures living in the city of Chicago. To paraphrase Kant, three things awe me most: the starry skies above, the moral law within, and my 100-square-foot backyard oasis that’s sort of insulated from the trash, rats, violence, and stoplight cameras that plague our daily life here. All jokes aside, there are few things I love more than going out back on a cool evening, cracking a cold one (with or without the boys), blasting some Ryuichi Sakamoto Black Sabbath, picking herbs and veggies from our raised garden, firing up my Weber grill, and absolutely going to town on a pile of dank, barbecued food. Sometimes, though, urban life doesn’t exactly make for the perfect rustic bonfire night or out-of-control grill session; with cats, dogs, constant Slack messages, other people’s babies, UPS deliveries, and stovetop dishes to cook, it’s not always possible to just vibe out at the grill like Tony Soprano, barking with your cronies about the “sanitation business” and other fun, totally legal things. I do indeed have a great Weber grill and a decent backyard fire pit; but part of me always longed for something perhaps more conducive to my Fast Paced Life™.

When I heard about the BioLite FirePit+, a fire pit/grill combo that lets you maintain your fire via Bluetooth, I thought it sounded pretty fucking stupid, TBH. Like, making and controlling a fire is the ultimate communion with our physical world—why would I mediate that through a piece of technology that I frankly really hate? Granted, you can use the FirePit+—henceforth I’ll just call this “the fire pit”—without Bluetooth, but then you have to wonder what the point is. With a pure and deep skepticism (and, admittedly, a bit of healthy desire for a new non-gas grill that’s easy to use and clean), I investigated the BioLite FirePit+.

Let’s proceed from the fact that this thing literally looks like those robot dogs that will one day kill us all. Seriously, it even has four legs and what looks like a head, and when it’s on fire, it becomes truly terrifying. That said, I do quite like the design—it has grates on each side that you can see through, which give it a pretty nice, techno-rustic feel. It’s also fairly easy to light—you can either put logs inside and do it old school, or you can start a few briquettes of charcoal in a chimney and put them in there before closing the grate on the top. I did the latter, planning to grill onions, mushrooms, and potatoes—all of which ended up tasting pretty solid. 

So, why electric? Why use your phone? Well, the BioLite technology uses a fan to stoke the flames to specific levels and to keep the smoke from going everywhere. And guess what: It fucking works! This is all to say, I’m a convert. I felt like my onions weren’t getting done quickly enough—I’m a big, hungry man with no time to waste—so I went on the app and turned the fan to the high setting. (It has low, medium, high, and max.) The grill got hotter, and the onions took on the nice char I’d expect from my Weber. The bottom grate (where the wood/charcoal rests) has two settings: all the way down, and about halfway up, so that if you’re using charcoal, you can get it real nice and close to your food. For some reason I chose to use the full open space, maybe just so I could get a look at how it works, but next time I’ll definitely be playing around with the levels, and probably getting some sick caramelization on a grip of gorgeous mushrooms from the farmers market. 

Honestly, there’s not much more to it—it’s a user-friendly piece of backyard grill gear that does a lot of the work for you. This fire pit has a trap door on the bottom so you can easily push out the charred remains, making it fairly quick to clean. I did find that when you remove the lid, you have to take it off by lifting it perfectly vertically, or else you’ll knock off or at least disturb the top grate, which is annoying; but otherwise, it’s actually a very straightforward device. 

Using a real grill is an important part of life, and I’ll never stop doing that; but next time I’m looking to vibe out back with some tunes and top homies, BioLite’s FirePit+ convertible fire pit/grill will probably be out there with me. 

Buy the BioLite FirePit+ at BioLite and on Amazon.

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