Death's Door BBQ competition is done, but a new national BBQ event is set for Door County
EGG HARBOR - The Death's Door BBQ national competition that drew so many barbecue cooks and thousands of fans to Washington Island each August is no more, but a new national barbecue competition is scheduled to come to Egg Harbor this fall.
Death's Door BBQ organizers announced Feb. 25 in a post on their Facebook page they had looked into reviving the previously annual Kansas City Barbeque Society-sanctioned event, which was canceled last year after the July 13 death of co-founder, director and driving force Richard "Dick" Jepsen, about five weeks before the 13th edition was set to take place Aug. 23 and 24.
About a month after Jepsen's death and after the cancellation of last year's competition, Death's Door BBQ committee members Cathy Meader and Mary Andersen each said for a story in the Advocate they hoped to bring back the event for 2025 but admitted it would be difficult at best without Jepsen's leadership and knowledge of the national barbecue scene.
However, in the Facebook post and in comments for that post, Meader and Andersen said the committee began to explore bringing back Death's Door BBQ this year.
But the committee subsequently learned the Brighton Barbeque Bash, an annual national competition in Oshkosh also sanctioned by the KCBS, moved its event from its usual July date to Aug. 22 and 23, which would have been the dates for Death's Door BBQ, and is planning to honor Jepsen at its event, as Death's Door would have done.
"I think I can safely say we were all ready to try and bring our competition back," Andersen wrote in a comment to the post, "but with the sanctioned event in Oshkosh, the same weekend that we always held ours, we felt it was impossible. It would have been a challenge without our leader, Dick Jepsen, but we were willing to give it our best."
Other comments to the post indicate organizers of the Oshkosh competition were under the impression Death's Door BBQ wasn't coming back when they scheduled their event with the new dates.
Suggestions were made in the comments to simply find different dates for Death's Door BBQ. But Meader responded, and told the Advocate last August for its story on Jepsen, that the date is important because the competition draws so many visitors to Washington Island.
From its beginning in 2012, Death's Door BBQ was held the last or next-to-last weekend of August, one before the Labor Day weekend, because that weekend didn't have much if any competition for tourist attention, falling between the large August festivals in Door County and Labor Day and the major fall festivals on the Peninsula.
"Unfortunately there really isn't another weekend where some other event is taking place on the Island," Meader wrote in her Facebook comment. "The weekend before Labor Day was a dead weekend for the Island."
Andersen told the Advocate last year Death's Door BBQ was almost definitely the biggest tourist draw for an event on the Island, attracting 2,500 to 3,500 locals and visitors annually for the weekend, along with about three dozen professional BBQ teams and numerous vendors.
She also said the event provided a huge boost to local nonprofit organizations that either set up vendor booths and were allowed to keep the proceeds – the Washington Island Lions Club made about $10,000 at the 2023 event, the final one, from beer and wine sales at their booth – or received thousands of dollars in donations from Death's Door proceeds.
But while Death's Door BBQ is dead, at least for this year, that doesn't mean there won't be professional barbecue teams grilling it out in competition in Door County.
That's because the KCBS website is showing the Rollin Smoke at Rustic Timbers BBQ Bash is scheduled for Sept. 26 and 27 at Rustic Timbers Door County Camping in Egg Harbor.
Not much information has been posted yet about this new event, but it is part of the KCBS Master Series of national sanctioned BBQ competitions. And, like Death's Door, it falls on a relatively quiet weekend on the Door County activity calendar, between Sturgeon Bay's Harvest Fest the weekend before and the Fall Fun Fest and Cider Pressing Party on Washington Island and Egg Harbor's own Pumpkin Patch two weekends later.
For more on the Egg Harbor barbecue event, call 920-883-8234 or visit rollinsmokebbqbash.com.
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Egg Harbor to host new national BBQ event with Death's Door's demise
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