The Low & Slow Barbecue Show 2025 in Review

As a NEW EPISODE rekindles the fire on The Low & Slow Barbecue Show for season 5(!) in 2026, let’s look back at our biggest year yet.

In this blog we’ll review new growth in our partnerships, as well as statistics for The Low & Slow Barbecue Show podcast, blog, YouTube Channel, and Lowdown newsletter.

From our warm-up in January through the seasonal break in late November, The Low & Slow Barbecue Show is produced thanks to The Mesh.tv network of podcasts, producer Andrew Moose, and advertising sponsor partners.

To our audience of listeners, readers, and watchers, thank you for being part of the Low & Slow Barbecue Show Union.

On to the 2025 Low & Slow Barbecue Show Review.

The Low & Slow Barbecue Show Podcast Performance

The Low & Slow Barbecue Show achieved new levels of success in our 4th season.

• New partnerships with Pinehurst Barbecue Festival and South Carolina’s Old 96 District opened the door to new festival experiences – and barbecue traditions to share with our audience on the podcast and Instagram.
• Carolina Barbecue Festival and Southern BBQ Network allowed us to be their platform for spotlighting Carolina barbecue traditions.

Combined, we covered 5 barbecue events in North Carolina and South Carolina during 2025. In turn, those events helped support the production of 42 podcast episodes.

Other 2025 milestones:

• Produced our 100^th episode
• Interviewed 18 barbecue pitmasters from 6 states – North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, and Arkansas.
• Exceeded 10K downloads
• Reached listeners in 68 nations (Shout out to our audiences in Sweden, Finland, Sri Lanka and Tanzania!)

Here are the 6 most popular podcasts produced in 2025 (based on downloads):

• Elliott Moss Unveils New Barbecue Project: Elliott’s in Florence
• Eric Pickle Brings Smoked Pickle Barbecue to Carolina
• Dampf Good BBQ, Brisket Tips & BBQ Business with Nick Dampf
• Sam Jones BBQ’s Michael Letchworth Shares his Carolina Barbecue Journey
• Christopher Prieto on Prime BBQ, Prime STQ, and Pinehurst Barbecue Festival
• Food Writer Andre James & Mount Rushmore of BBQ

Low & Slow Barbecue Words

The genesis of The Low & Slow Barbecue Show is a lifetime spent sharing stories.

The medium varies – newspapers, digital websites, marketing deliverables, and radio broadcasts, but there’s always been burning a natural fire that’s only needed a little tending along the way.

I did that for The Smoke Sheet, a weekly nationwide newsletter produced by BBQ Tourist Ryan Cooper and NYC BBQ Sean Ludwig. This great barbecue resource affords me space to stretch my foodie journalism legs. It’s a nice break from supply chain tech content (my main hustle) and it brings our Carolina barbecue stories to a wider audience.

These feature articles published in The Smoke Sheet during 2025.

• Farm BBQ: Bringing Carolina BBQ to Maryland Farms – January
• The Carolina BBQ Festival’s Best Bites – April
• Pinehurst Barbecue Festival Boosts Economic Growth – September
• Golden Rule BBQ Continues to Grow its Legacy – October

Low & Slow Barbecue Blog

The Low & Slow Blog is a space where I can spew more words about:

• Whatever barbecue notions enter my head
• Ideas that hold the potential to inform our audience
• People working hard in the barbecue life

15 new blogs published in 2025 with pitmaster spotlights, event previews, reviews, barbecue news, and a few recipes. These were the 5 most popular Low & Slow blogs from the year.

• Carolina BBQ Festival 2025 Guide: Pitmasters BBQ for a Cause
• The Alabama Barbecue Chase Spotlights Bama’s Best BBQ
• Meet Golden Rule BBQ the Nation’s Oldest BBQ Joint
• 50 Best BBQ Joints in the South: What’s Missing?
• The Low & Slow Show Review: Jim ‘N Nick’s Community Bar-B-Q in Hickory

Averaging >1 blog a month and national byline per quarter is a good benchmark to build on in 2026.

Low & Slow in Live Action Video

Video hasn’t killed the radio star, and it won’t completely replace all these written words or photographs. Still, platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok pour gas on humanity’s preference for video.

And if you combine fire and food and faces of the people putting the two together, it makes an awful lot of good video.

The Low & Slow Barbecue Show expanded our video footprint with live festival footage on our Instagram page, as well as podcasts, videos, and shorts published to YouTube.

In 2025 our YouTube channel gained 80 subscribers. We published 52 videos and 12 shorts of pitmaster-on-the-street interviews, a pickle-eating competition, and mouthwatering barbecue eye candy.

Top 5 viewed videos:

• The Smoked Pickle Pitmaster Eric Pickle Reveals Plans for Future
• Carolina BBQ Festival: Smoke Tenders on the Street Interview
• Old Colony Smokehouse Pitmaster Adam Hughes Revisits Barbecue Roots
• Sam Jones BBQ Pitmaster Michael Letchworth Shares Barbecue Backstory
• Elliott Moss Previews Elliott’s Barbecue Restaurant and Lounge

The shorts get more views thanks to a tendency to go a little more viral – especially that video with the pickle eating.

Top 4 viewed YouTube shorts:

• Cheeseburger Wins Pickle Eating Competition at the 25^th Annual Squealin on the Square
• Here comes the turkey! Smoked turkeys rest before Thanksgiving
• Car Show at the 2025 Squealin’ on the Square in Laurens, SC
• Poole’s Diner Chef Ashley Christensen’s Blue Crab & Grit

The Lowdown Newsletter Lowdown

Finally, in our State of the Low & Slow Barbecue Union, our newsletter, The Lowdown. While the newsletter format is mostly fixed, work continues on evolving the voice, the volume, and the information resources we share week to week.

The subscriber audience for our weekly newsletter continues to grow – up 68% in 2025.

Between January and our seasonal break in November 2025, The Low & Slow Barbecue Show distributed 39 newsletters. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Lowdown, and you’ll get our Carolina barbecue newsletter delivered to your inbox.

It includes Carolina barbecue news, barbecue business news, food truck schedules, and a barbecue festival event calendar. Our newsletter also includes links to our most recent content and our favorite partners.

Subscriptions are still free. I produce the newsletter because I love Carolina barbecue and the people around it. I hope you do, too.