The Barbecue Chronicles: Austin is the new Lockhart BBQ Tour

       The Texas BBQ Posse dives into a spread of sausage, brisket, ribs and turkey at La Barbecue in Austin. 

(Photo by Tom Fox/DMN)     

Story by Gary Jacobson

It would be easy to get carried away by what’s happening in Austin barbecue.

Amid a fertile startup environment, young pitmasters are creating a smoked-meat renaissance, using only wood-fired pits and adopting old-school ways to cook for a new generation. A case could even be made that Austin has replaced Lockhart as the capital of Texas barbecue.

We’ll leave that big-think stuff for another time. This is a story about barbecue tourism.

The Texas BBQ Posse has been riding since 2009, and the mission on its most recent tour was to sample as much of that good Austin barbecue as possible during a day trip from Dallas, covering 400 miles in 13 hours.

The five places we visited were all located within a 5-mile radius of the state Capitol building.

The Posse's Austin BBQ Tour: Is Austin poised to overtake Lockhart as the barbecue capital of Texas?

Stops on the Austin BBQ Tour, clockwise from top left: John Mueller Meat Co., Franklin Barbecue, La Barbecue and Stiles Switch BBQ & Brew. (Photos by Tom Fox/DMN)

The Dallas Morning News just posted Gary Jacobson's story on our recent Austin BBQ Tour on both dallasnews.com and the DMN iPad app. The print story will appear on the in the newspaper's travel section on Sunday.

This may have been the best single day of barbecue we've ever had on tour, sampling four meats from each joint visited. As a collective group, the brisket, ribs, sausage and turkey from La Barbecue, Franklin Barbecue, John Mueller Meat Co. and Stiles Switch BBQ & Brew were outstanding. We had a fifth joint on the itinerary, but Micklethwait Craft Meats had run out of meat for the day by the time we got there at 2 p.m.

Sneak peek at our Austin BBQ Tour

Lunch no. 1 at Franklin Barbecue. (Photo ©Chris Wilkins/Texas BBQ Posse)

The Posse was wheels up from Dallas early this morning to check out the growing Austin barbecue scene, which we believe could be overtaking Lockhart as the capital of Texas BBQ. This trip was a chance to test that theory.

Stay tuned to the Texas BBQ Posse blog for stories and snippets from the trip. Our reporting will culminate at the end of April with a story in The Dallas Morning News and multimedia on dallasnews.com.

Here's the trip itinerary: