Masterbuilt Gravity Series 1150 Digital Charcoal Grill and Smoker: BBQ in Bulk | PCMag

Jul 01, 2025

If you enjoy the flavor that you get from a charcoal grill but find that you’re spending too much time tending to the coals and making sure your food doesn’t burn, consider the Masterbuilt Gravity Series 1150 Charcoal Grill and Smoker. This $1,099.99 beast of a smart grill uses a digitally controlled fan to keep its 1,150-square-inch cooking chamber just the right temperature for low and slow smoking, high heat searing, and everything in between. It works with a user-friendly companion app and delivers tasty charcoal-grilled food. That said, you can’t send preprogrammed recipes to the grill, and it doesn’t offer push-button ignition. For those features and more, you’ll want to consider our Editors’ Choice winner, the $1,099.99 Brisk It Origin 940.

At 52 by 58 by 32 inches (HWD) and 262 pounds, the Masterbuilt Gravity Series 1150 is the biggest and heaviest grill I’ve tested. It's even bigger than the $1,999.99 Traeger Timberline 1300, which measures 48 by 57.6 by 27.6 inches and weighs 226 pounds. The 1150’s stainless steel construction gives it a look and feel of extreme durability. Thankfully, it has four hard rubber wheels (two of which lock for stability), which make it relatively easy to move from place to place despite its dimensions. Most of the grill has a matte black finish with the exception of the lid, lower storage doors, and folding front shelf, which all have a silver-tone finish.

The grill has a 1,150-square-inch cooking chamber with reversible cast iron grates for searing or smoking. A foldaway rack positioned above the grates is ideal for smoking and keeping food warm. The chamber can accommodate up to 51 burgers, 12 racks of ribs, or 19 chickens. It has a temperature range of 225 to 700 degrees Fahrenheit and comes up to temperature quickly, within 15 minutes. Masterbuilt includes a single probe to monitor your food's internal temperature.

A charcoal hopper built into the right side of the grill can hold up to 12 pounds of lump or 18 pounds of briquette charcoal. At the bottom of the hopper is a fire box that provides the heat. As the coals burn, the hopper uses gravity to feed charcoal to the fire. There’s a door on the top of the hopper for adding charcoal, and a firebox door down below. Behind this door is an ashtray and an air intake vent, and just above that is a heat intake vent. The grill comes with two metal slides that can be used to cut off the air and heat intakes when you shut down the grill. This helps extinguish the fire and conserve charcoal so you can reuse it.

The control panel sits between the hopper and the firebox. It has a 3-inch display in the center, four probe inputs, and a five-button function control on the left, and a settings dial on the right. The five-button controller has a power button in the middle and buttons for starting a timer, setting the grill temperature, setting a probe temperature, and connecting to Wi-Fi.

Unlike the $1,699.99 Kamado Joe and the $1,199.99 Traeger Ironwood 650, the 1150 doesn't offer an auto-ignite feature. Instead, you’ll have to use a firestarter to ignite the charcoal. To do this, open the firebox door, place a firestarter in the slot on the charcoal grate, and light it up. Wait a minute or two for the starter to catch and close the firebox door. You can now set your desired target temperature and any necessary timers.

The 1150 has built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi (2.4GHz) radios for pairing with your phone and connecting to your home network. It has a recipe database with more than 250 entries for beef, pork, seafood, and poultry grilled dishes, but it doesn’t offer AI-generated recipes like the Brisk It Origin 950. Additionally, you can’t send recipes directly to the grill like you can with the Origin 950 and the Traeger Ironwood 650. The Masterbuilt mobile app (free for Android and iOS) will send push alerts when your target chamber and probe temperatures are reached, when a timer has less than a minute left, and if any ignition or grill errors occur.

When you open the app, you’ll see the current cooking temperature and panels for setting the target temperature and the cooking time. Below these panels is a Session Graph that displays the cook time, current and target temperatures, and probe temperatures, as well as a graph of cooking temperature changes over time. Tap View All Sessions to see a history of cooking sessions with this same data.

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Tap the gear icon in the upper-right corner to access the settings screen, where you can configure Wi-Fi, view Wi-Fi signal strength data, select a temperature unit (Fahrenheit or Celsius), and enable automatic firmware updates.

The fact that the Masterbuilt Gravity Series 1150 comes with more than 100 bolts and fasteners is a pretty good indicator that you’ll need to put aside a couple of hours (or more) to complete the job of assembling it. You’ll also need a second pair of hands to turn this beast upside down and to attach some of the parts. Fortunately, the sealed hardware pack contains clearly marked numbered blister packs for each size bolt, and the illustrated instructions tell you exactly which bolts to use during each phase of the assembly.

I followed the instructions with no issues until it came time to install the hopper, which requires six M6 bolts. Up to this point, all of the bolts were easy to tighten by hand using a Philips screwdriver, but these six bolts would only thread in halfway, no matter how hard I tried to tighten them. This left a gap that would not allow me to snug the hopper to the hopper gasket. After some back and forth with tech support, I decided to use a ratchet breaker bar to force the screws into the threaded holes. I was able to tighten everything up, but it wasn't easy and I ended up breaking off a screw in the process. After that, the rest of the assembly went smoothly and took just under three hours to complete. By comparison, I needed a little over an hour each to assemble the Brisk It Origin 940 and the Traeger Ironwood 650, and around six hours to assemble the $1,599 Weber Genesis EPX-335 grill.

With the grill fully assembled, I downloaded the Masterbuilt mobile app and created an account. I plugged in the 1150, tapped the plus button on the app's devices screen, and selected the 1150 from the list of grills you can add. I pressed and held the Connect button on the grill's control panel, and once I heard a beep, the app recognized the grill, so I entered my Wi-Fi SSID and password to complete the pairing. I preseasoned the grill according to the instructions, which took around two hours at various temperatures, and it was finally ready for some grilling.

The 1150 worked wonderfully in my tests. It had no trouble maintaining my target temperatures and always sent alerts when they were reached. It took around 15 minutes to heat up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit and a few minutes longer to hit 600 degrees.

I prepared a rack of baby back ribs using my favorite rub, set the target temperature to 225, and slow-cooked the ribs for around six hours, spraying them down with apple juice every half hour or so. The 1150 kept the temperature at or around 225 for the entire cooking cycle, and when they were done, the ribs were perfectly cooked. The meat didn’t have a very strong charcoal flavor as the grill uses forced air instead of cooking directly over a charcoal flame, but it still had lovely charcoal-cooked accents. You can always add wood chips to the hopper to get a more smoky, woody flavor if you wish.

Burgers, hot dogs, and corn on the cob cooked on the 1150 all tasted fantastic. I took a whole chicken, rubbed it with butter, salt, and pepper, and roasted it at 350 degrees until the probe read 165 degrees (about one hour). The bird was crispy on the outside and wonderfully juicy on the inside, and it was delicious.

Cleanup was easy. Once the grill and the ashes were cold, I emptied the ash tray, wiped down the grates and racks with warm, soapy water, and wiped down the entire grill with a wet rag. I then unplugged the grill and covered it to protect it from the elements.

With the Masterbuilt Gravity Series 1150 Digital Charcoal Grill and Smoker, you don’t have to worry about replenishing charcoal to keep the fire burning during long cooking sessions. It uses a gravity hopper that holds up to 18 pounds of briquette coals and a digitally controlled fan to maintain your desired cooking temperature, and it comes with a handy mobile app that lets you adjust the heat and set probe alerts and cooking timers. It’s a solid choice for backyard grillmasters who prefer the taste of charcoal-grilled food. That said, it’s a bear to assemble, and it lacks some of the smarts that you get with our Editors' Choice winner, the Brisk It Origin 940, which offers AI-generated recipes that you can send directly from your phone to the grill for a foolproof BBQ experience.