Exclusive: Big Green Egg’s Highly Collectible Outdoor Fireplace Is Back — Hands-On Preview
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Returning for the company’s 50th anniversary, the Big Green Egg Chiminea will make you wonder why you ever wanted a traditional fire pit.
Eggheads, gather ’round. The Chiminea is back. To celebrate its 50th anniversary, Big Green Egg will rerelease its highly collectible outdoor fireplace but not without a few design tweaks to improve the overall performance of this cult classic from the late ’90s.
Reviving a Classic
Chimineas are outdoor fireplaces that originated in Mexico and the American Southwest in the 16th century. Traditionally crafted from clay, they’re popular alternatives to regular fire pits because of their long, narrow chimneys that that can be used in rain or shine.
“When we launched the [original] Chiminea back in the late 1990s, we saw the product as a compliment to the outdoor cooking lifestyle,” Big Green Egg CEO Dan Gertsacov tells Gear Patrol.
“We saw the product as a compliment to the outdoor cooking lifestyle.”
That version featured the same NASA-grade ceramic as its iconic grills, as well as a distinctive cone-shaped chimney that channeled smoke upward, away from people and pets seated around it. And, of course, it was green.
Original examples of the Big Green Egg Chiminea remain elusive. It was retired just a few years following its release, and too few exist to satiate the company’s growing fanbase and its seemingly bottomless appetite for anything big, green and eggy.
According to Gertsacov, the idea to reissue the Chiminea came from mining online forums, social media and word-of-mouth feedback.
