Chud's BBQ

Bradley Robinson grew up in a small town in New Hampshire and studied audio engineering in Maine before moving to Austin, Texas. The Austin BBQ scene became his apprenticeship: he worked as a pitmaster at Freedmen’s alongside Evan LeRoy, then did stints at Micklethwait Craft Meats and Eastside Tavern with Cade Mercer, before rejoining LeRoy at the newly opened LeRoy & Lewis Barbecue — one of the top joints of the modern Texas BBQ era. Many of LeRoy & Lewis’s pits were built or modified by him.

In April 2020, early in the pandemic, he posted his first Chud’s BBQ video — a build of a backyard offset smoker. The channel grew into one of the most-watched BBQ accounts on YouTube: 400,000+ subscribers, 60 million+ views, a near-daily rhythm of cook videos and pit-build episodes. The product line followed: the Chud Box (a direct-heat box cooker in the LeRoy & Lewis “cowboy grill” style), the Chud Grill, the ChudPit reverse-flow offset, the ChudPress, the ChudTable, plus rubs and tools.

Today Robinson runs Chud’s BBQ out of Manchaca, just south of Austin — founder, host, and pit builder all in one. He still cooks daily and still builds the steel he cooks on.

Restaurant-quality Texas BBQ in a backyard. Robinson’s thesis is that the gap between an Austin smoke shack and a competent home cook is reproducible reps, not secret knowledge. The channel walks the daily craft — trimming, fire management, pulling temps, slicing — at the same pace it gets run in a real pit room. His brisket trim is one of the most-recreated videos in BBQ YouTube.

Pit design and fire physics. Robinson is a fabricator before he’s a YouTuber. The build series — reverse-flow offsets, direct-heat boxes, the ChudPit — teaches how steel thickness, baffle geometry, firebox sizing, and stack placement actually shape how heat moves. The product line (Chud Box, Chud Grill, ChudPit) is the productized version of the same lessons.

The direct-heat “cowboy grill” style. The Chud Box turned LeRoy & Lewis’s direct-heat steak-and-burger menu into a backyard format. It’s the workhorse cooker for high-heat beef work that doesn’t belong on a low-and-slow offset — picanha, burgers, tomahawks, smash patties — cooked over a clean coal bed at grate.

Robinson’s voice is quiet, repetitive, and craft-first. No theatrics, no contest stagecraft, no science-as-spectacle. The videos read like a real shift in an Austin smoke shack — the same brisket trim, the same fire build, the same wrap, the same slice, again and again. The reps ARE the lesson.

He doesn’t compete. He doesn’t do big-personality TV bits. He doesn’t chase recipe-content drama. What he does instead is build the steel, light the fire, run the cook, and walk the viewer through it at working pace — the opposite end of the BBQ-media spectrum from the competition-circuit teaching style.

The other half of the voice is the fabrication side. Robinson reaches for the welder as easily as the brisket knife, and the channel treats pit design as part of the craft, not a sidebar. That’s rare in BBQ media — most cooks teach on whatever rig they bought — and it’s the lane that turned Chud’s BBQ into a product company on top of a YouTube channel.

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