We finally did it. After a year and a half of selling barbecue out of a pop-up tent, the Bourbon Brothers BBQ crew is buying a food trailer.
It wasn’t an easy road—one that’s taken a couple of weird turns—the biggest being the fact that we finally bought one.
So how did we get here? It’s funny, actually.
It started two years ago when our pitmaster Matt Keyser partnered up with a woman named Brooke Cormier who asked us to sell barbecue at a big music festival in Montgomery County.
At this point, we had only done two pop-ups at a brewery, neither of which had gone really well. In fact, the first went pretty damn badly.
But Matt was set on it, if for no other reason than to put our name on a billboard next to William Clark Green. You know, the Texas country artist.
She likes the Beatles, and I like the Stones…
They say I’ll wind up dead or I’ll end up in jail…
I was just a young man, a little wet behind the ears / she grew up at the country club with the diamond chandeliers…
Saying Matt loves William Clark Green is like saying Walter White loves cooking meth.
Without any real preparation, and having sold to maybe 100 people during our first two pop-ups, we decided to go for it and serve hundreds at one event.
Our tent was the busiest at the festival. We got rave reviews from catering VIP. This success set us on a path of doing more events with the promotor. We fed thousands of people. We worked so hard on the Fourth of July that Caleb, our other pitmaster, suffered heat exhaustion. At these events, we fed musicians like Gary Allan, Josh Abbott Band, Bri Bagwell, Josh Ward, and Jeff Canada.
Then Brooke left the company earlier this year, and we were stuck on the outside looking in rather than having the inside track to every festival. Now, these events accounted for 75% of our revenue the year before. Without them, we were facing a serious question: Now what? We had to act — and act fast.
Each year, we make a pilgrimage to far Northeast Texas where the border blurs between Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, and spend four days improving every aspect of our food. We call it BBQ Camp. This year, we kept discussing food trucks and trailers.
We knew we were at a crossroads. We had bought everything we needed for a pop-up tent, and any further investments for the tent were to keep us in a tent. We agreed that our food quality wasn’t meeting our standards because we needed better equipment—warmers, steam tables, a stovetop—all to serve our food as fresh as possible. We had to move to the next phase: a truck or trailer was it.
Food trucks are cool. Who in this industry hasn’t seen “Chef,” the John Favreau movie inspired by Roy Choi about a chef who is exiled from the industry, starts a food truck, and finds his passion?
Obviously, it’s Hollywood and there are things they don’t discuss. We are chefs, not mechanics, and there is a lot that can go wrong on a truck. If it breaks down, you don’t serve that day.
A trailer, though, while not as sexy, has fewer working parts and can make the food life a lot easier.
So, after much debate, we settled on a trailer. We’d been looking for the better part of a year, but prices for even the junkiest looking ones were far too high. Some looked like a shed from Home Depot mounted on a single-axle trailer that was selling for $20,000.
No, thank you.
Finally, we one. It’s an old taco trailer that’s been parked in a guy’s backyard for the past six years. It needs some work, for sure. Scrubbing the dirt and grime that’s built over the years. Repainting the inside and outside. Replacing some plumbing and electrical cords.
But the bones are great and the frame is solid. And it comes with a fully stocked kitchen: two refrigerators, a double oven, a steam table, a stovetop, and two serving windows large enough to slice meat to order.
Problem is, two dogs chewed through the main power cable so we have no idea if any the appliances work.
There’s still so much work to be done before we can even think about taking it in for health inspection, let alone before we start selling.
The point I’m trying to make is there are so many things you have to learn when taking your food business to the next level, like buying a food trailer.
For instance, our trailer has some light rust on the outside, mainly to sheet metal. Normally, you could sand this and paint over it, but it looks like that was done by the last owners. So we are going to have to sandblast it and apply bondo.
I can’t tell you how little I know about sandblasting and bondo.
We also need to fix the air conditioning. Last I checked, none of us are HVAC certified.
But for the first time in two years, we are nervous and extremely excited. Having a location for weekend service will allow us to start serving barbecue weekly. And as far as we have come in two years, when you start cooking every weekend, that’s when you really become great at your craft.
Lotis Butchko is the executive chef of Bourbon Brothers BBQ. Texas BBQ is a weekly newsletter aimed at inspiring and helping you grow as a backyard barbecue cook. Each week, you’ll receive tips and advice, personal stories, and Q&As with Texas’ top pitmasters delivered directly to your inbox.