Blog 3 Hogback History in BBQ Part 2

Part 2 of our history kind of shifted our barbecue gears to another speed. Somewhere around 2001-2002, my sister had to give me a book about barbecue for Christmas. When reading this book I began to experiment with making my own sauce. Around late 2003 I mastered my version of what I thought was a Piedmont-style North Carolina Vinegar Barbecue Sauce that we still serve today. After consulting with the author of the book Virginia BBQ: A History Joe Haynes I found that our barbecue sauce can actually be considered both a Carolina and or Virginia Barbecue Sauce, more on that in another blog post later. With the development of our sauce, our interest and the quality of barbecue we cooked began to improve. By 2005 we were starting to feed large groups of family and friends in the summertime. A good friend had been deployed overseas in the military for a year when he returned home we cooked for his welcome home party and fed a group of roughly 70 people The largest group of people we had fed to date. With our passion growing, we started to run into two problems when cooking. First, our cooker was not as large as we needed to feed the groups we were trying to feed. The second issue was that once the warm summer months would pass and the weather turned cold along with autumn winds it proved to be very difficult to maintain the cooker as it got colder outside. This sent me on a quest to find a large piece of 1/4" thick wall steel pipe to build a barbecue cooker that could easily cook year-round.

A future blog post will tell the story of the pipe transformation.

In August of 2007, I located a long piece of 24" diameter pipe in Raphine, Virginia that would be perfect to build a barbecue cooker. I approached the owner and he agreed to sell me a 7ft piece of the pipe for about $400 which I purchased. This pipe had 3/8" thick steel walls which would be great for insulating the cooker temperature for cooking in cold winter months. This section of pipe was part of the roughly 80 ft pole that held the fuel price sign up at the gas station across the interstate from White's Truck Stop in Raphine. The story of building this cooker will be a future blog post. Toward the end of building the cooker I was watching a barbecue competition on The Food Network and a bell went off in my mind. Wouldn't it be cool to enter one of these competitions? The next night while working on the cooker I told my brother that I had looked up competitions and the Virginia State BBQ Championship was two months away in Danville Virginia. He thought we should go visit the competition, learn about it, then enter the following year. I told him it was too late I had paid the $250 entry fee and sent the application that morning. We had two months to finish the cooker, learn how it cooks, and prepare for the event. Danville, Virginia Pigs in The Park May 16, 2008, would be our first competition. It was about this same time we were approached by the Rockbridge Area Free Clinic. They heard about us building a large barbecue cooker and asked us to help them cook beef for their fundraiser called Bull & Oyster Fest. In April 2008 we used this fundraiser as a test run and have been volunteering to cook "The Bull" for this event annually now for 10 years.

Leading up to the first competition we had about 6 weeks to prepare. I would spend nights looking online to see what was involved in the cooking competition barbecue. Back then there were only two competitions in the state of Virginia and they were on opposite sides of the state on the same day. If you wanted to compete you had to choose one or the other. When researching competition barbecue the about 5 teams you could find info about were Pigs on the Run, The Virginia BBQ Pirates, Checkered Pig BBQ, and Dizzy Pig BBQ. By far Dizzy Pig BBQ had the most info and pictures online to view and investigate this thing called competition barbecue. Competition scoring required you to come up with a team name that was unique to the entire USA for scoring purposes. We set off to Danville with 7 team members which were Ruben and Jennifer Showalter, Marty Strecker, Larry Weeks, Chris Strecker, Stephen Showalter, and Wayne "Weasel" Reese. One thing that 6 of our team members had in common is that we all had a view of Hogback Mtn in Rockbridge County from our home and Larry's farm was at the base of the mountain. After a team name search, we found that the name was available and Hogback Mtn BBQ was born. Our extended team that weekend was Anthony & Katie Showalter, Becky Strecker, Judy Weeks, and Harry Swisher who made the journey with us for support.

Pigs in the Park Danville, VA 2008 VA STate BBQ Championship

We arrive in Danville at the competition site on a Friday afternoon, it had seen severe rain the night before and the park was a muddy mess. We located our cook site and tried to make the approach and Larry's truck sunk into a mud hole just as you approached our site. Larry in frustration floored the accelerator throwing mud to the top of the large maple tree he was under. When he shut the engine down a cool, calm, and collected gentleman in the cook site beside ours calmly stood up grabbed one of the many bottles of liquor on his table walked over, and passed the bottle into the now buried, muddy truck, and said no worries man you're here. This calm and collected man would go on to be a very good friend and mentor on our barbecue journey. It was Chris Capell pitmaster of Dizzy Pig Barbecue the team I had found so much info about when researching competition barbecue prior to the cook-off.

While setting up our cook site I asked Chris if the Dizzy Pig BBQ Team had ever gotten to compete in the Jack Daniels World Championships, you must win a state championship to be invited to cook in this prestigious event, to which he replied something like "yea the past 6 years in a row". It was about this time and Johnny Trigg the 2 Time Jack Daniels World Champion drove his rig by us and set up 3 spots down from us. There were 58 teams from as far away as Texas and Canada there competing that weekend. I strongly remember turning to our crew and asking "what have we gotten ourselves in to". Discouraged a bit as we were clearly out of our league. It did not, however, dampen our excitement to just be a part of the event, cook our thing, and have fun. The worst thing that could happen is we'd enjoy a few cold ones and eat great the following day.

At 5 pm it was off to the cook’s meeting where the KCBS Reps go over the rules for the event that followed. Chicken would be turned in at noon on Saturday with ribs, pork, and brisket to follow in 30-minute increments. You have a 10-minute window to turn each meat into the judge’s tent. Judges would then judge our entry on appearance, taste, texture, and tenderness and score accordingly. The winners would be decided by getting a call/award for a 1-10th place in each meat category and the grand champion would be the one who had the best-combined score in all four categories. The night's cooking was uneventful and we managed to cook what we thought were four solid meat entries for the judges. I remember tasting the brisket just off the smoker, it was the best brisket I had ever cooked. I'm standing there thinking we might have a chance at winning with this. It was about that time that my brother reaches over my shoulder with a sample of brisket given to us cooked by Dizzy Pig BBQ. As I put their brisket in my mouth it only took a nanosecond for my brain to ignite to a place I could only dream 'Holy Mother of God" I think I uttered as I threw the slice of brisket we had cooked back into the pan. "Boys we ain't got shot at winning today" I yelled across the cook site. If eating my first pig roast in the early 1990s was a spark, cooking my own barbecue and developing a sauce was the smoke, building a barbecue cooker created the embers for a fire then this bite of barbecue cooked by the Dizzy Pig BBQ Team was gasoline on my barbecue journey igniting the flames like nothing I'd ever dreamed! Everything in me from that point forward worked to achieve the knowledge and skills to cook barbecue at the level of these guys.

KCBS Judges scoring meat appearance.

We were having a great time that day. I learned a lot and had a blast that Saturday in May but the day was not over. We had the awards ceremony around 5 pm that evening to see who had won the cook-off. The contest organizer stood up, thanked everyone for coming and participating then began to call the awards from 10th place down to 1st in the chicken category, then on to ribs with pork and brisket to follow. It was about that time that I heard him over the load speakers say 10th place in goes to..... Hogback Mtn BBQ... wait did he just say... no, no way as the team behind me smacks me on the shoulder and says get your ass up there you got the call! To say I was hooked on competition barbecue after that would be an understatement. This set us on an 8-year competition barbecue journey meeting new friends, learning, and winning our share of awards along the way. This leads to Part 3 of Our History Through Barbecue...

First Award 10th Place Pork VA STate Championship