Vortex Insert

The Vortex is a steel cone with both ends cut off — a wide rim at one end, a narrower rim at the other, open all the way through. It's spun from 20-gauge 304 stainless and made by Vortex BBQ, a small Indianapolis shop that started selling the accessory online in the early 2010s. There are three sizes (small, medium, large) keyed to the 18-inch, 22-inch, and 26-inch Weber kettles, and the cone drops directly onto the charcoal grate without any modification to the cooker.

The shape is the whole product. By piling charcoal inside a cone instead of spreading it across the grate, you stack the heat vertically and concentrate it under a tight footprint — which leaves the rest of the grate available for food sitting in clean, indirect convection. The cone is the same accessory whether you fly it narrow-end-up (a tall, focused chimney of heat for wings and high-heat roasting) or wide-end-up (a broader hot zone for searing). It also works inverted on smaller kamados and ugly drums.

Packed with lit coals, a Vortex acts like a small open chimney. The cone walls trap the radiant heat coming off the charcoal and channel the rising hot air straight upward through the open top — concentrating the fire into a narrow vertical column instead of letting it spread sideways across the grate. With the kettle lid closed, that column rolls up, hits the dome, and circulates back down the outside of the bowl, washing the outer ring of the cooking grate with indirect convection heat on the way past.

The result is two cleanly-separated zones on one fire: a screaming-hot center directly above the cone (easily 600°F+ for radiant searing) and a moderate indirect ring around the perimeter that runs roughly 375–450°F — hot enough to render skin and roast chicken to done, gentle enough that nothing on the outside of the grate gets a direct flame. Food on the ring cooks by hot air, not by line-of-sight to the coals. Like any charcoal cooker, you steer the overall temperature with the kettle's bottom intake vent.

The four-configuration claim is what Vortex BBQ leans on in their own marketing — the cone gives you a kettle that does several different cooks without changing accessories:

The Vortex earned its reputation on one cook: crispy chicken wings on a Weber kettle, no flipping, no babysitting, twenty to thirty minutes from grate to plate. Malcom Reed of HowToBBQRight popularized the technique on YouTube, and the result is genuinely hard to beat — wings ring the outer grate in the indirect convection zone, render their fat, and the column of heat rising up the middle browns the skin to shatter-crisp without scorching the meat.

Beyond wings, the cone earns its $60 on any cook that wants a focused hot zone plus a clean indirect ring on one fire: spatchcocked chicken, bone-in pork chops, a ring of sausages, a quick batch of skin-on chicken thighs. It uses noticeably less charcoal than a full bed for the same outcome, lights faster, and packs flat for storage. As a single-job accessory that makes one famously good cook reliable on a kettle anyone already owns, it's the cheap upgrade that pays for itself the first time you make wings for a crowd.

The Vortex is a specialist, not a general-purpose grill accessory — and reviewers who test grilling gear for a living are honest about its limits.