Best Wood Pellets for Smoking — The Pros and Enthusiasts Favorites

It strikes me as odd that Bear Mountain BBQ is a lesser-known and seen brand, as they make some of the best grilling pellets you can buy. They’ve also been around for 30 years now selling made in the USA smoking wood pellets, with a commitment to sustainability.

They have a complete range of different flavors to choose from and perfectly pair with whatever you’re cooking and your particular tastes. They sell a few different flavors including alder, apple, cherry, maple, mesquite, pecan, and pictured is the ‘Gourmet Blend’ (a custom blend of hickory wood pellets, maple, cherry, and oak.)

All Bear Mountain BBQs pellets are 100% natural premium hardwood, with no additives, binders, or fillers. They have a low moisture level, leave behind minimal ash (expected with zero-additives), burn at a consistently high heat, and produce wonderfully flavor elevated foods.

The only single species pellets are the oak and alder, being made from 100% a single species of wood. But the flavor wood pellets such as apple, oak, and cherry are blended with either oak and alder. They are not 100% flavor woods, they are a blend.

But this is ok. As explained on their website, this ensures a good, consistent burn rate and heat output across their entire range, and hence predictability in your cooks. There are no cheap filler woods or oils. The blends are all either alder or oak mixed with flavor wood.

For us, these are right up as the best wood pellets for smokers.

Give these pellets a try, we’re sure you’ll like them. If you want a good all-rounder, go with the gourmet blend or pecan wood pellets, which pair with pretty much anything.

If you have specific meat in mind you’re cooking, check out our provided ‘wood to food pairing’ table at the end of this guide.

Founded over six years ago, CookinPellets started with a small home wood mill after an unsatisfactory pellet grilling experience by the owner.

They are now a popular product, positively-reviewed and loved by many competition cooks and backyard pitmasters alike.

People praise the great pricing, particularly for the long-lasting 40lb bulk bag, the strong flavors produced, and the consistent quality of the product.

Cookinpellets always come up as highly recommended in forum and Facebook discussions of the best wood pellets for smoking. You can’t argue with that kind of good feedback and popularity.

They do, however, only have a limited range compared to most other brands. Their selections are limited to:

• Perfect mix (pictured), a hickory base with hard maple, apple, and cherry
• 100% hickory wood pellets
• 100% black cherry wood pellets
• A hard maple and apple blend.

All varieties contain no oak or alder, and no fillers.

Their perfect mix blend combines four of the most popular hardwoods for smoking into a single, exclusive smoking pellet package.

By using four of the most popular hardwoods, CookinPellets 40PM Perfect Mix deliver nothing but flavored smoke, (hickory, maple, apple, and cherry.).

This blend should lend itself to just about anything you want to smoke. It’s a good introductory pellet for someone just starting out with a pellet grill thanks to its blend of quality pellets with a crowd-pleasing smoky taste.

It’s not overpowering, nor is it too light. It burns hot and clean, and the cherry smoke gives a crowd-pleasing, great-looking reddish tinge to your meats. Highly recommended.

Used by numerous competitive grilling teams — we love knowing that a product is backed and used by professionals — and increasingly popular with backyard enthusiasts. BBQr’s Delight make high-quality, 100% natural wood pellets in a variety of flavors.

In the last couple of years, they’ve seen a HUGE increase in their fan base in the BBQ community, with many, many people recommending them strongly in forum and Facebook group discussions. And as I’m sure you’re aware, the BBQ community can be quite brutal when it comes to shooting down poor quality products, so the fact they are so widely used and loved is good praise indeed!

BBQr’s Delight has a wide range of products from many types of wood, so if you like what you taste, you’ll want to try some of the dozen other flavors they offer. It’s nice to be able to stick with one line, knowing you’re going to get quality every time.

Their range includes standard staples such as oak pellets, hickory, pecan, sugar maple, cherry, apple, and mesquite wood pellets. But they also sell more esoteric orange, peach, sassafras (hints of root beer?), and a ‘contest mix,’ a 50/50 pecan and cherry mix.

All their pellets are 2/3rds white oak, with 1/3 of the indicated flavor wood, except for the ‘contest mix,’ which is 66% oak and 17% each of pecan and cherry.

This blended oak base ensures a consistent, predictable, steady burn, the same across their range, so you can plan your cooks the same no matter the flavor you use.

These are nicely formed pellets, made without filler or oil, with low moisture content, and they burn hot and clean.

This brand is a favorite of many grillers on the competition circuit. They are very well-made. If you want to grill like the pros, choose the fuel many of them use. These are a fantastic mix of performance, flavor, and price.

Pit boss is a popular and leading brand of pellet grill manufacturer, so it’s little surprise to see they sell a range of hardwood smoker pellets too. After all, there’s money to be made!

But don’t fall into the mistake of thinking they’re only popular because owners of their grills like to stick to the brand and buy what they know. These are good quality pellets at a reasonable price.

They sell the most popular classic flavors such as oak, pecan, maple, hickory, mesquite, apple, cherry and whiskey barrel.

And they also have various blended products of different mixtures of flavor woods, going by intriguing names such as ‘trophy,’ ‘classic,’ ‘competition,’ ‘pitmaster,’ ‘classic,’ and ‘fruitwood’ blends. Too much to describe and list here, you can check out these blends and their ingredients at the pit boss website, perhaps purchase and try a few to see which you like best?

Pit boss pellets are 100% natural hardwood sourced from across North America, containing no artificial flavoring oils or sprays, no glues, and no chemicals.

This company prides itself on making premium quality wood smoking pellets suitable for anyone from weekend warriors to professional pitmasters.

Lumber Jack takes a different approach to their product — they debark the oak in the blend, but leave it on the flavor wood for a more intensely flavored smoke. This makes these potentially the best pellets for smoke flavor.

It’s hard to argue with extra flavor! That’s what pellet grilling and smoking is all about, right? We think a little extra ash from burned bark is an acceptable trade-off for real wood flavor.

Also, because they’re 100% wood, we know they’re going to burn great and provide excellent smoke.

It’s also interesting to note that Lumber Jack doesn’t use cast-offs from sawmills. This is a dedicated wood product business, and they use their own trees for making pellets for both cooking and heating and shavings for pet bedding.

Lumber Jack has an extensive product range of five classic and five blended flavors, meaning you can pick and choose, mix and match, and always know the quality you’re going to get. Highly recommended!

Louisiana grills is a 20-year veteran in the world of BBQ product manufacturing, well known for their popular and quality line of pellet smoker. So it’s only natural they expanded into supplying wood pellets for smoking too.

These pellets are made from 100% natural raw hardwood sourced from across North America, with no artificial flavors, binders or chemicals added.

They have a wide range of flavors available, including hickory, mesquite, whiskey barrel, cherry, and apple.

We recommend the slightly sweet and lovely cherry blend to suit most meats, or the ‘competition blend pellets’ as a good all-rounder and to dip your toe into the product line.

Try one of those two, see if you like them and then try other flavors. This blend is a combination of maple, hickory, and cherry, making it suitable for pretty much all foods, imparting a medium strength smoke flavor rand some great color from the cherry.

All flavors are available in 20lb and 40lb bags, from Amazon or Louisiana’s website.

You can’t go wrong when you buy from one of the most trusted names in the business.

If you’ve been living under a rock somewhere, you may not know that Traeger is a beloved name in the industry. They’re kind of the Harley-Davidson of pellet grills. They make grills, rubs, sauces, and, of course, pellets, but they’re synonymous with the term ‘pellet grill.’

Traeger pellets are some of the most popular you can buy. They use 100% all-natural, pure virgin hardwood sourced from sustainable, existing manufacturing industries. There are no additives, and no trees are felled purely for production.

Traegers range of pellets includes the classics such as hickory, apple, cherry, pecan, and mesquite. They also have a ‘signature blend,’ which is what we recommend as a great all-rounder and consists of a mix of hickory, maple, and cherry woods combined.

However, after a recent class-action lawsuit, it’s now well-known that they add flavoring oils to the base hardwoods used.

You can argue that by opting for flavored hardwood and oils instead of 100% flavor wood, you’ll get all the natural flavors, but with the enhanced even burn quality of oak or alder. And this is a fair point. But if you want the actual woods you’re hoping for, those listed on the bag, you may want a product higher up on this list.

But if you’re happy with flavoring oils, are already a Traeger fan (a Traegermeister?), you already know you want these. And if you don’t know Traeger, these are worth trying to see what all the fuss is about.