This year, I went to Texas Monthly BBQ Fest for the first time! If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a Texas BBQ festival held annually in Austin rounding up 30+ of the best pit masters statewide. Three hours of unlimited meat samples!!

I went with a large group of all guys, which perhaps, was a mistake (I couldn’t keep up), or to my benefit (they kept me going). I went in hoping that I could taste $80 worth of bbq, but probably not be able to eat $80 worth.

We ended up splitting into smaller groups as we ran around frantically trying to get as much meat as we could. I ended up feeling really full after 30 minutes, and had to tap out. But thankfully, the guys below helped me rate each of the bbq places we tried from 1-10 (10 being the highest). Not every guy was part of each rating, and I want to put a disclaimer here that in no way were our ratings scientific.

We were able to taste test 18 bbq places. As we tried more and more bbq meats, they started to blur into each other and only the really bad bbq stood out. As such, I will put in parenthesis what order we tried each place. I fully recognize the difficulty of the logistics in making bbq at this scale and don’t believe that these rating necessarily reflect on the quality of each bbq place.

Highest Rated BBQ (with ratings of 8 out of 10)

These were our favorite BBQ places based solely on the samples we received the festival.

1. Louie Miller Barbecue (2) – My personal favorite 🙂
2. Lockhart Smokehouse (8)
3. Roegels Babecue Co. (14)
4. Truth BBQ (14) – This place has a rating of 5 on Yelp!!

Most Reputable BBQ

This is the BBQ that is known across Texas for having the best BBQ. I’ve put our review and order that we visited each BBQ place below (review/order).

• Franklin Barbeque  – They ran out before we got any (don’t we till the last 30 min!!)
• Snow’s BBQ (6/9) – Usually much better, may have been the batch we got. This was our expected 10 that we were searching for!!
• Mickelthwait Craft Meats (7/13) – I love their sides!!
• La Barbecue (7/12)
• Louie Miller (8/2) – My favorite!!
• Killens – Was not present at the festival this year

Tips for Newbies

1. I wore a long-sleeved flannel shirt with jeans. Worst mistake ever. Make sure to dress comfortably to run from station to station.
2. Bring a disposable metal tray to carry your samples around. This frees up your hands to carry more than one sample. I saw tons of people do this and think it’s genius.
3. Bring plastic gallon bags. Be okay with not finishing your samples. Something I wish I did was share my samples with someone in the beginning or dump half into my ziploc bags to eat for later. This would’ve prevented me from feeling too full only 30 minutes in.
4. Drink water!! And bring some veggies to eat on the side. There weren’t that many sides this year, and personally it was really hard for me to eat meat continuously without anything to cleanse my palate.
5. Come early! We got to the event place about an hour early and the line was already really long to park. So make sure to plan ahead.

Is it Worth It?

Definitely!! The tickets are $80 so maybe not something to do every year, but for unlimited samples to the top 30 BBQ places across Texas it’s a pretty good deal. The food is delicious and the atmosphere is electric with live music. I had a ton of fun, and the food was delicious.

Total Ratings

Here are all the ratings in the order we visited them. There were 30 vendors, but we weren’t able to go to all of them.