Chapter 43: It’s Always Good to Be in Holland
A Conversation with Abraham van de Vuurst
Weber Grill Master, Amersfoort, Netherlands
Conducted by Gary R. Hafer
Abraham (Bram) van de Vuurst is the Weber Grill Master of the Weber Grill Academy in Amersfoort, Holland. Born in Spakenburg, Bram has been grilling since he was a youngster when he learned to smoke fish with his grandparents. His first purchases in covered grilling consisted of a Weber kettle and a Smokey Mountain cooker.
This interview was conducted in August 2022 over Zoom.
I will be attending their Weber Fanday festival on March 29. More about that will follow on the website.
Gary R. Hafer: Hello! Hello! Good morning, Bram. Good afternoon, Bram.
Bram van de Vuurst: Hello, Gary! Nice to see you and to speak to you, and good afternoon. Yeah, I'm enjoying my coffee.
Hafer: Oh, I love that Weber mug. We don't have those in the States. But I have a Weber bow tie on.
van de Vuurst: Yeah, I see it [laughs].
Hafer: I’ve been following you for so long and your exploits, including your grilling training sessions. . . . Tell me, where did you grow up?
van de Vuurst: In a small town in the Netherlands, a fishing town. There are a lot of dikes there; the Dutch are good at making dikes [both laugh]. So both my grandparents are fishermen. The village is still known for the fish they sell to all of the Netherlands and European markets. And that's also where my passion for barbecue and came from.
I also pursued higher education—university studies—in facility management and informatics. My focus was technology, information technology, and facility management. I worked a long time as a sales manager.
But I barbecued for about 15 or 20 years. It was always my passion, and in the end, Weber asked if I want to join them in making it my job.
Hafer: That’s fascinating. But how did a citizen of Holland become interested in American grilling and barbecue?
van de Vuurst: As you now know, it started with growing up in a fisherman village, and smoking eel and salmon, and using woods in smoking cabinets; it's a very old technique, right? It's there for a couple of 100 years, and it was mainly meant to preserve the food and make it taste better.
Yeah, I like to do that, but I also like barbecuing, and it became big at a time in my life when I wanted to make a website. But you need something to write about [laughs], and I like barbecuing. So the site was the old school—direct heat—and not on a Weber, but just on a regular barbecue grill. I thought I’m gonna have to write about it on the website so everybody can enjoy it. The website grew very fast, and I got a lot of calls and questions and that kind of thing. In the end, I had a very large following.
Hafer: What year was that?
van de Vuurst: That was in 2005. It’s what we call the dark ages of barbecue.
Hafer: So how did you learn indirect grilling?
van de Vuurst: By buying the book by Stephen Raichlen [author of the Barbecue Bible], and I went to the barbecue forums to learn a lot more. Soon I had a Weber kettle and a Weber Smokey Mountain.
Once I started Weber grilling, I did some competition cooking. In the early days of the Barbecue Forum in the Netherlands, we had meetings with 10 or 15 people. We wanted people to have much fun. In those days there was no [Weber] Grilling Academy.
Hafer: How did you get your kettle?
van de Vuurst: There was a Weber presence in the Netherlands. We lived very close to a NATO base. So there were a lot of Americans over here, and they already had a kettle or a Genesis [gas grill]. That was many years ago.
Hafer: Lovely. . . . When I was at Weber, Denmark, I learned that the way Danes became familiar with barbecue was through a rock star who brought a Weber kettle onto a television talk show. After that, Weber became an overnight hit in Denmark.
From what you're telling me, the Dutch people have a long history of smoking. How How did the Dutch respond to grilling? Did they find it strange to see covered cooking or was it just something natural?
van de Vuurst: In the beginning in Denmark, barbecuing was all direct grilling with open barbecues and a lot of cooking where the food was black on the outside and rare on the inside. [Both laugh.] But the Netherlands is a charcoal country, and we use it constantly. The Germans use a lot more gas grills; the Kamodos here are very popular as are all the grills on charcoal.
Hafer: How is the Netherlands responding to the pellet grill?
van de Vuurst: Yeah, they just don't know about it yet. I do a lot of teaching about it these days; Weber-Netherlands hired me to do just that. The Dealer Days at the Weber Campus [a regional and seasonal grilling institute] is the place where I taught about the SmokeFire [the first Weber to use pellets]. The dealers see us smoke whole meats and steaks to realize what we can do on the SmokeFire—and that's a lot! If they use it, they will see the potential of it, and then will think, “Okay, I want that grill!”
Hafer: Tell me about the Weber Campus; I’ve seen pictures of it on social media. We don't have anything centralized like that in the United States, so can you tell me a little bit about it: what it is and how it functions?
Van de Vuurst: Yes. Weber has a lot of dealers in the Netherlands. Most of them are small—small by American standards. Three or four stores are garden centers, but the rest are also hardware stores. Weber invites about 50 dealers for each day, about 200 different people over 4 days in total. I teach a workshop with the SmokeFire, and somebody else does a workshop with new accessories, and another about the new Genesis [gas grills], and so on. So everybody can get hands-on experience the new barbecues and explain to their customers what works, and why is it a great, real, and tremendous.
Hafer: Cool. So what is the barbecue cuisine like in the Netherlands? Do the Dutch prefer national cuisine or do they want American barbecue or from other places in the world?
Van de Vuurst: What attracts a lot of them is American barbecue. It is very popular over here—ribs to pork, that kind of thing—mainly because we didn’t have barbecue restaurants. Now we have some, and they have made American barbecuing popular. But there is also barbecue versions of national cuisines like soup or fish. And we always try to teach how to make vegetables and desserts on the barbecue.
So we make a complete menu, not only the fast, high heat grilling, but the kind that encourages them just to relax and enjoy company.
Hafer: How about manufacturing? I know Weber opened a new manufacturing facility in in Poland. Do you have easy access to new grills?
van de Vuurst: There is no change at the moment, but there may be. We're left with taking the leftovers from Germany, but Germany is a big country compared to the Netherlands, so Germany will get the new grills first and we have to wait. On the other hand, we're in a hub with Great Britain and Belgium. In sales, the Netherlands are somewhat smaller than Great Britain, but Great Britain has five times the population of the Netherlands.
Hafer: Why is the Weber Grill Academy and Original Store in Amersfoort rather than Amsterdam? Two years ago, I had an airplane stop at Amsterdam, but there just wasn't enough time for me to get to your store and back in time for my connecting flight.
van de Vuurst: Next time! Yeah, you're always invited to Amersfoort, Gary. The store and grilling academy is in the middle of the country, so there is easy access.
Hafer: Thank you so much, Bram. If you're in the States, you're certainly invited to Skytop.
van de Vuurst: One of my colleagues is coming to the States.
Hafer: Oh, which one? Is it Rob? Yorick?
van de Vuurst: Yes, it’s Yorick. He's right here [in the break room]!
Yorick Verbeek: [suddenly appearing on camera] Hi, Gary!
Hafer: Hello, Yorick!
Verbeek: I see several posts from you on Instagram. Until last month, I was in charge of our Instagram account. We handed it over to a company to do it for us. But you are a great Weber friend.
Hafer: Thank you.
Verbeek: The most likable picture from you is the one where you stay with your truck, and where you license plate says “Dr. Weber.” Yeah, we like it! [We all laugh.]
van de Vuurst: Yeah, getting back to your question about Amersfoort, Amsterdam is what we think of in the Netherlands as a big city, one million inhabitants. That means also very expensive houses and small gardens, and nobody's buying a barbecue there. They are all going to restaurants.
Amersfoort is exactly in the middle of the nation, and it's only 25 miles from Amsterdam.
Hafer: I live in a very small town: Williamsport, Pennsylvania. You may have heard of Little League baseball.
van de Vuurst: I looked it up because I sent you a package! [Both laugh.]
van de Vuurst: It's always good to be in Holland. The farthest visitors [in the Netherlands] have to travel to visit the Weber Original Store here is two hours. It’s a perfect location.
Hafer: That's wonderful. Is this the only store in the Netherlands, and the only one with the Grill Academy?
van de Vuurst: It's just the only Weber Original Store in the Netherlands There are many in Germany and three in Austria, I think. We have seven Grill Academies in the Netherlands.
Hafer: Wow! Are any mobile? Do they travel or are they in fixed locations?
van de Vuurst: They are mainly in partnership with restaurants, Weber-Netherlands says I
work for the Weber Original Store, but I manage the Grill Academies where we do five classes in a week. We have eight different courses.
Hafer: That’s great. Take us through just one of your favorite grilling experiences in the Grill Academy or as a grill master.
van de Vuurst: In 2019, we organized our first Weber Fan Day. Oh, it was amazing. We thought that maybe we would have 500 people, but we had way more—3,000. People crammed into the store—it was completely full. People had a great time, and we made a lot of friends. The guests bought a beer or something nice and stood calmly in line at a cashier, which was was very long. People became friends in the line, and it was truly amazing. It was something we never expected!
We wanted to do it this year [2022], but COVID was the game stopper. We want to do it next year, and we're going to open a museum exhibit. We have some Weber collectors here in the Netherlands, and we want to show off their collections. We were looking for the Wishing Well grill (from 1960s); I don't think anyone has that one, but they have all those vintage barbecues. Yeah, we want everyone to experience the whole WeberFan Day around the end of March.
Another thing what I’ve done is have Weber sponsor a football team. We grilled for the football team, and we brought a Ranch Kettle and made eleven chickens on it. The team is in a region called Friesland.
Hafer: That is so wonderful. Bram, is there anything you thought I should have asked you, or that you would like to speak about?
van de Vuurst: No, but I can speak for hours about this topic! What I like very much is the Summit Kamado. That's a really really great barbecue because she can very quickly go high in temperature; otherwise, I like cooking on the Smokey Mountain.
Hafer: What do you think of the Weber Crafted accessories?
van de Vuurst: The flattop. Extraordinary! Very nice with the pellet grill. Yeah, it is a bit like cheating. Sometimes I feel guilty using a pellet grill because it always comes off perfect.
Hafer: What's surprised me about the pellet grill is how it cooks vegetables. The smoke that infuses with the vegetable differs than charcoal. I can't haven't grilled enough of them with it to be able to tell why.
van de Vuurst: Eggs taste different too—just wonderful on the SmokeFire.
