Father's Day BBQ Gifts for the Dad Who Guards the Barbecue

Start him off with a bag of chips

If he's never smoked food before, a bag of wood chips is the easiest way in — and the cheapest. Our Fine Wood Chips for Smoking come in eight flavours and suit hot smokers and smoking guns, while Coarse Wood Chips for BBQ & Smoke Boxes are the ones for the smoke box on a barbecue. Both are under £5 a bag, which makes them a proper stocking-filler of a gift.

One thing worth knowing before you choose: buy any three bags of chips or dust and the cheapest one is free, applied automatically at checkout. Three bags gives him a real choice on the day, rather than one guess at a flavour he might not take to.

Help him find his flavour

Smoking wood is a bit like tea: everyone ends up with a favourite, but only after trying a few. The BBQ Wood Chip Variety Pack For Smoke Boxes brings several flavours together for around £20, while the Sampler Pack of Wood Chips - 12 Flavours! does the job thoroughly — twelve flavours to work through for around £25, enough to keep him experimenting well past summer.

If you want something that looks the part straight out of the postbag, the 10 Flavour Smoking Wood Chips Gift Pack is made to be given — ten flavours, ready to hand over, at around £30. We can add gift wrap and a message card at checkout too, and we always leave prices off the slip.

Turn the barbecue he owns into a smoker

He doesn't need a new machine to smoke food — the barbecue he already guards will do it. The Deluxe BBQ Smoker Box Gift Set With 6 Woods turns a compatible BBQ into a smoker, and it comes boxed with six woods to try, at around £35. Of everything on this page, it's the one we point most people at: enough to change how he cooks without asking him to learn new kit from scratch.

Something he hasn't tried: cold smoking

Hot smoking cooks the food; cold smoking adds flavour without cooking it — it's how smoked cheese and smoked salmon get their taste. The ProQ Original Cold Smoke Generator is the bit of kit that makes cold smoking possible, at around £35. If you'd rather give him the whole way in at once, the Cold Smoking Starter Kit is a complete start for around £45. For the dad who has already worn a groove in his barbecue routine, this is a genuinely new hobby.

The full kit, for clubbing together

If the family is clubbing together this year, the Complete Hot Smoking Kit with Smoker & Wood Chips is the full setup in one box: the smoker itself, six woods to try and guides to get him going, at around £80. He'll need burner fuel, which isn't included as we can't post it, so pick some up before the big day. It's the gift for the dad who has hinted at a smoker for years and never got round to it.

Wrapping, posting and getting it right

Order before 3pm and we dispatch the same day — we pack every order ourselves, the same as we have since 2012. Mainland UK delivery is free on orders over £30 and £3.50 otherwise; Royal Mail Tracked 48 aims for 2–3 working days after dispatch but is not guaranteed. If it's going straight to his door, add gift wrap with a message card at checkout; we always leave prices off the slip.

Still not sure which way to go? Our 60-second gift finder quiz will narrow it down in a minute, and you can browse everything else we'd recommend in our gifts hub. And if he unwraps something he already owns, returns are easy within 30 days, so a wrong guess is easy to put right.