Ratings
141 grills scored on the same six categories, at the same six weights — 846 individual category judgements, each one with a written reason behind it.
That covers 141 of 184 published reviews. The other 43 are older reviews carrying a headline Avid Griller Score but no category breakdown, so they appear in the review index and not in the ratings table.
The six categories
The Avid Griller Score is these six, weighted as shown — not an opinion with a decimal point on it. The weights are the whole arithmetic: Maintenance carries 10%, so even a score of zero on it costs 1 of the 10 points on offer — the same weakness in Heat Performance costs 2.5× as much. That is why a grill can rank well with a visible flaw, and why a grill that does not cook well cannot recover on fit and finish.
- Heat Performance 25%
- 8.2 mean · 6.0–9.5 across 141 grills
- Long-term Reliability 20%
- 7.4 mean · 5.5–9.5 across 141 grills
- Build Quality 18%
- 8.4 mean · 6.5–9.6 across 141 grills
- Ease of Use 15%
- 8.3 mean · 6.3–9.5 across 141 grills
- Value 12%
- 8.0 mean · 6.0–9.7 across 141 grills
- Maintenance 10%
- 7.9 mean · 5.8–9.7 across 141 grills
Lowest mean in the corpus: Long-term Reliability at 7.4, which is also the second-heaviest weight at 20% — the category grills most often lose points on is one of the ones that counts most. Highest: Build Quality at 8.4. Read these as relative, not absolute: every grill is scored against the ones a buyer would cross-shop it with, so a mean says where cookers fall short within their own tier rather than against the whole catalogue — how we score sets that out in full.