Welcome to Beachbum BBQ

It's 12:30 PM on a Saturday in Snellville, Georgia. Your grandfather places a heavy plastic bag on the kitchen table. He sorts through it and places a small styrofoam box and a cup with a lid in front of you. You don't know it at the time, but what's inside those containers will alter the way you see food going forward. You open them up to find a pulled pork sandwich and a cup of Brunswick stew. The sandwich is simple: pulled pork on a cheap, white bread bun. It's perfect. The Brunswick stew is like nothing you have ever eaten before. Tomatoey and meaty. Light yet hearty. It's probably pork, but you are just told it's usually made with squirrel. In any case, it is delicious, and the sacrifice of either critter is appreciated.

There was a barbecue food truck that sat at a gas station on Scenic Highway in Snellville called Jimmy's. My grandfather, Toby, used to take me there on Saturdays for lunch. To this day, it is my favorite pulled pork sandwich, and I have never found a comparable Brunswick stew.

Hi, I'm Nicholas!

I am the founder of Beachbum BBQ, and this is the very first blog post I have ever written. The more I tried to write it, the more I realized something. This isn't really about the sauce, the seasoning, or even the recipes. My goal is to share my genuine excitement for barbecue with people who might find it just as interesting as I do.

I grew up outside Atlanta, where barbecue meant pulled pork, ribs, and Brunswick stew. Honestly, that felt like enough. Before high school, my family moved to Fernandina Beach, a small town right on the Georgia-Florida border. The barbecue scene wasn't much to speak of back then, but Fernandina gave me something more important: a real love for Florida. Not the Florida of theme parks and hurricane seasons, but rather the quiet, coastal, understated version that most people never slow down enough to find.

It was in Jacksonville where I started cooking seriously. I was working through the skills I picked up from my mom and from Toby over the years. I kept chasing that memory of Jimmy's sandwich. Smoking pork on weekends, adjusting, trying again. It was less about perfecting a recipe and more about trying to understand why that sandwich was so good and whether I could find my way back to it.

Then I found myself in Waco, Texas.

I'll be honest… I didn't get it at first. Everything I knew about brisket came from delis, and deli brisket, while perfectly fine, had never made me feel particularly jazzed. The idea that beef was the king of barbecue seemed like something Texans just told themselves. They are a proud people, after all.

I get it now. I do.

Tony DeMaria's in Waco. Basically, anywhere in Austin. LOCKHART. One meal at the right spot will completely rewire what you think is possible when you slow cook meat. There's a patience and a simplicity to Central Texas barbecue that demands respect. The method is the flavor.

Trying different barbecue spots in Texas made me stop thinking about what I was going to make and start thinking about how I was going to make it. That's a different question entirely, and it's the one that stuck.
I still lean toward pork and chicken for everyday cooking, but you cannot beat a properly smoked brisket or a beef rib that pulls apart the way it's supposed to. What I came away from Texas with wasn't a desire to compete with any of that. I wanted to take that Central Texas philosophy (patience, fire, simple ingredients) and bring it back home. To layer it with the sweet, acidic, smoke-forward flavors of the Southeast. To make something that made sense for where I actually live.

I moved back to Florida and landed in Satellite Beach, right on the Space Coast. The more I cook and settle back into being home, the more I realize Florida has a real barbecue story, and almost nobody is telling it.

This is a state with deep cattle country, a coastline built on open-fire cooking, and a food culture that draws from Indigenous traditions, Spanish influence, and the same Southern roots that shaped Georgia and the Carolinas. It isn't overlooked because it isn't there. It's overlooked because no one has taken the time to connect the dots. That's exactly what Beachbum BBQ is trying to do. Not to declare Florida the best barbecue destination in the country, but to make the case that it belongs in the conversation in the first place.

There are plenty of talented pitmasters and barbecue folks in Florida doing serious work right now, and I'll be pointing you toward them throughout these posts. This is a community, not a competition.

But there's also history here worth digging into. History that goes back much further than most people realize. Over the next few posts, we're going to start pulling that thread. Where did barbecue actually come from? How did it spread across the South? And where does Florida fit into that story?

I think you'll be surprised. I know I was.