Digital Hospitality

Changing Lives Online with AmazingRibs.com | Meathead | DH040

07.02.2020 - By Shawn P. WalchefPlay

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The Man, the Meat, the Legend.

You’ve heard his memorable moniker before, but just who is Meathead? He’s a griller, journalist, and web pioneer behind Amazing Ribs dot com who’s been teaching the Internet how to BBQ right before Google was the end-all-be-all search engine.

At 71 years of age, Meathead Goldwyn is among the most-respected members of the barbecue and grilling community. For good reason.

Having penned books, busted myths, and studied grilling for decades as showcased on his legendary website www.AmazingRibs.com, Meathead’s digital legacy speaks for itself.

“With AmazingRibs.com I have not only found my niche, but I have found that I am having an impact on the world,” Meathead told Digital Hospitality podcast host Shawn Walchef on episode 40 of the Cali BBQ Media show.

“Every day we get a reader or a member of our Pitmaster Club who sends me a message saying, ‘You've changed my life, you've made my life better. I didn't know how to cook until I met your website. When I come home from work, the kids say, Mom, can Dad cook tonight?’”

 

Meet Meathead

Meathead, birth name Craig Goldwyn, is a self-described "Barbecue Whisperer, Hedonism Evangelist, and Culinary Mythbuster."

He and his team at www.AmazingRibs.com have created a engaged community who keep coming back to hang out in the online clubhouse. Visitors can enjoy tested recipes, product reviews, science-based cooking tips, audio and video content, and much more.

The BBQ Central Show host Greg Rempe, our friend and former Digital Hospitality podcast guest, has even hosted a “PitCast” podcast for the members of the AmazingRibs.com Pitmaster Club.

Meathead released his second Deep Dive Guide e-book of 2020 in time for the July 4 holiday — a pork rib primer called "Amazing Ribs Made Easy," coauthored by Meathead and AmazingRibs.com's "Senior Vice President of Whatever" Clint Cantwell.

As AmazingRibs.com continues to grow in membership and readership, Meathead remains committed to the success of the website and its dedicated community.

“I want the website to live beyond me,” the proud website founder said on Digital Hospitality.

For the man who once wanted to run for President or win a Nobel Prize, Meathead found his chosen way to change the world through online community and BBQ.

So, how did Meathead become an authority of amazing barbecue and an online pioneer? It was a low and slow evolution.

 

Origin of Meathead

Growing up, before he became Meathead, the young Craig Goldwyn was a scholar in the classroom.

“When I was in high school and college, I got pretty good grades,” Meathead said about his younger years. “I was a journalism major in college, and I wanted to be a newspaperman. It was very highly respected profession once and I was well-trained.”

In college, Meathead would study down in Gainesville, Florida, becoming both an author and a Gator before finishing his formal education in the Midwest.

“Way back in the ‘70s when I was in college I was at the University of Florida,” recalls Meathead. “I was trained as a writer, but I also had a great deal of interest in photography. I got my Master’s in Fine Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago which is a great art school.”

With all this education and smarts, his next move might be surprising.

“I went to work in a liquor store,” Meathead laughs looking back.

While working in a liquor store wasn’t a joke then, it became the springboard for his professional career just as much as college itself.

“One day a week, a guy would come in with a big old beer cooler full of ribs,” Meathead looks back at his days in the liquor store. “He would sell the ribs to the patrons. I thought this was the coolest thing."

"I tasted these ribs and I'd never had anything like it. I was a 21-year-old college kid and these ribs just blew me away.”

That first taste of ribs would leave an impression on Meathead. As fate would have it, the man selling ribs out of a cooler in a liquor store was no rookie in the game.

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