How a $14 LIZZQ Smoker Tube Turned My Gas Grill Into a Real Smoker

I have had a gas grill on my back deck for the better part of fifteen years. My Weber spirit, my trusty propane setup, it has cooked hundreds of burgers and a fair number of chicken thighs that could only be described as edible. But every time my neighbor Darnell fired up his offset smoker two houses down, I could smell that hickory floating across the yard, and I felt like a fraud. I was the guy from Memphis who grilled on gas. That is almost a misdemeanor where I come from.

I tried the old tricks. Wood chips in a foil pouch, tossed right on the burner cover. They would smolder for about ten minutes, put out a thin sad ribbon of smoke, and then just turn into ash. I tried a cast iron smoker box, which was better but still burned through the chips way too fast during a long pork shoulder cook. I told myself gas grills just could not do smoke. That was the lie I lived with for a decade. Then one evening I was down a Reddit rabbit hole at eleven o'clock and I found a thread where somebody mentioned the LIZZQ Premium Pellet Smoker Tube. The comments were almost annoyingly enthusiastic. I ordered one anyway, mostly out of stubbornness.

It showed up in a small package. Twelve inches of perforated stainless steel, hexagonal pattern, lightweight, the kind of thing that looks like it should cost more than it does. I filled it up with hickory pellets from a bag I already had for my buddy's pellet grill, torched the end with a butane lighter for about a minute until it caught, let the flame die down, and set it on the grate next to a three-pound pork butt I had seasoned the night before. Then I closed the lid.

Forty minutes in I lifted the lid to check and a real wave of hickory smoke rolled out. Not foil-pouch smoke. Real, honest-to-goodness wood smoke that my neighbors would be able to smell from the street.

That pork butt cooked low and slow for about five hours, and the tube kept producing smoke for almost all of it. Four to five hours is what LIZZQ advertises and that matched my experience almost exactly. The bark that formed on the outside of that pork shoulder, on a gas grill, had a genuine smoke ring when I sliced into it. My wife Denise came out to investigate the smell twice. My kid asked why the grill was acting different. I stood there feeling like I had been holding back the whole time and just found the gas pedal.

The part that surprised me most was the cold smoke session I ran a week later. I had never cold-smoked anything in my life. I packed the tube with apple wood pellets, lit it, let it settle on the grill with the burners completely off, and smoked a block of cheddar for about ninety minutes. The cheese came out with a genuine light smoke on the outside, enough that I brought it inside, wrapped it up, and let it rest for a day before slicing. My family ate the whole thing in about four minutes at Saturday lunch. That is not a thing my gas grill was ever supposed to do.

Now I will be honest with you because that is kind of my whole deal. There are a couple of things worth knowing. The tube rolls around a little on round grill grates, so you want to tuck it against the corner of the cooking area so it stays put. I also found that cherry pellets can produce more smoke than hickory at first, which burned a little hot right at the start of a cook and left some soot on the grate near the tube. Nothing serious, just wipe it off. And for really long cooks, twelve or fourteen hours on a big brisket, you will want to refill the tube around the halfway mark. None of that changed my opinion of the thing. It is a seven-dollar accessory, correction, it sits right around fourteen dollars now, that does what it says and then some. See my full long-term review at the link below if you want the complete breakdown with temperatures and pellet comparisons.

What I Would Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you are a gas griller who has been telling yourself you just cannot get real smoke flavor without dropping a thousand dollars on a dedicated smoker, I am telling you right now that story is not true. I told it to myself for years and I was wrong. You need a bag of wood pellets you probably already have access to, a cheap butane lighter, and the LIZZQ tube. That is it. I am not saying it replaces a full offset smoker if that is your ambition. But for a Tuesday night pork tenderloin or a Saturday afternoon slow-cook for the family, this thing closes the gap in a way nothing else in that price range comes close to doing. My gas grill is still on the deck. I just finally stopped apologizing for it.