Alby Ransom: Scuffletown Smokers Pitmaster and BBQ World Cup Qualifier

For thirteen years, Alby Ransom and his uncle Stan have cooked barbecue as a team of two, hauling a smoker out of southern Indiana on the weekends the rest of life allowed.

They come from Boonville, a town of about six thousand people that the locals affectionately call Boon Vegas. Next April, Ransom gets to bring Boon Vegas to the real one.

His team, Scuffletown Smokers, took Reserve Grand Champion at the KCBS World Open and earned one of a hundred seats at the BBQ World Cup, the inaugural cook for $1,000,000 in Las Vegas.

It is a long way from the first contest he ever entered, where he finished forty-seventh out of fifty and never once heard his name called.

How Alby Ransom Got Into Competition BBQ in Indiana

Barbecue came to Ransom the way a lot of good things do, as a present he did not quite know what to do with yet.

He got a smoker as a wedding gift, and he and Stan started cooking most weekends for the family, working through the usual backyard rotation. It might have stayed there if Ransom were a calmer man.

He is not. He calls himself extremely competitive, and one night an episode of the television show BBQ Pitmasters lit the fuse. If people were doing this for trophies, he wanted in.

He found a Kansas City Barbeque Society contest down the road in Evansville, the Smoke on the Ohio, and signed up.

His sister told him he was going to win. He finished forty-seventh out of fifty.

They never called his name, not once all weekend, and instead of souring him it set the hook for good.

He wanted to know exactly what the teams at the top were doing that he was not, and he went about finding out with the patience of a man who intended to be around a while.

Family and a full-time job kept him from chasing every contest, so he built his own practice season instead, cooking in the driveway on his own timeline through the cold months.

Ransom has spent seventeen years at Federated Insurance, where he sells commercial insurance as a senior marketing representative, which makes the barbecue a serious craft pursued in the margins of a serious career.

By 2019 the off-season grind was paying off. He came out in 2020, cooked ten contests, won five of them, and finished reserve at a sixth.

Why the Team Is Called Scuffletown Smokers

The name is older than the winning, and it comes with a history lesson.

Before Boonville, Ransom and Stan lived in Newburgh, a town that sits right on the Ohio River. Back in the Civil War era, one rough stretch of the river port there earned a nickname for all the brawling that went on in it. People called it Scuffletown.

Ransom liked what the word carried, a little small-town grit and a nod to the place he came up, and he made it the team's, spelled with a single S.

Scuffletown Smokers has been on the banner ever since, a two-man crew named after a patch of riverbank that used to settle its arguments with its fists.

Ask Ransom what he cooks best and he will tell you he is good at all four, then admit the truth underneath it.

Chicken is his money category, the one that scores highest for him week in and week out, and it took him the better part of three years to get it there. It is also the cut he has never won a world title in, which needles him a little, because by his own count he has won world titles in brisket and in pork.

He is a stick-burner man who leans vinegar over sweet, and if you make him pick a barbecue region he picks Texas, all of which says he came up chasing flavor the hard way rather than the easy one.

How Scuffletown Smokers Won the 2024 Jack Daniel's Invitational

For all the trophies, one prize stayed out of reach for years.

The Jack Daniel's World Championship Invitational in Lynchburg, Tennessee, is the hardest room in barbecue to get into, an invitation-only field drawn largely by lottery, and Ransom and Stan had built Scuffletown chasing it.

In 2024 they finally got drawn, and in their very first year on that stage they won the whole thing.

On October 12, Scuffletown Smokers were named Grand Champion of the 35th Jack Daniel's, posting a 702.8228 across the seven categories against the best cooks in the world.

Fellow qualifier Phil Breeden was there filming when their name came over the speakers.

"We've won other big contests over the years," Ransom said afterward, "but the one thing missing was The Jack."

A former high-school ballplayer who once lost a state final and never forgot the sting of it, he has a simple way of ranking the day. Winning the Jack, he says, was it.

He is just as quick to tell the story of a weekend that humbled him.

Earlier this year he flew in late to Smoke on the Shores near Nashville, straight off a trip to the West Coast, underprepared and out of his rhythm, and by his own account got his butt kicked.

He took the lesson rather than the excuse. Stay true to your preparation, he decided, and never let your guard down just because the trophies are stacking up.

It is the kind of thing a man says when he plans to be cooking for a long time yet.

Alby Ransom's Team: Uncle Stan and His Family

The team has always been two, and the other half is family.

Stan is Ransom's uncle and his co-founder, the constant across all thirteen years, and when Ransom is asked to name his dream cooking partner he does not have to think about it. It is Stan.

The rest of the crew runs through his own house. His wife is his first taster and his straightest critic, the one who samples the turn-in boxes, tells him what she really thinks, and holds the family together on the weekends he is gone, all while coaching the girls' softball that fills the calendar when barbecue does not.

The couple have two daughters who have grown up around the smoke.

Ask Ransom for three words his family would use to describe him and he offers funny, hard working, and caring, in that order.

What Alby Ransom Would Do With $1,000,000

What Ransom would do with $1,000,000 says as much about him as any trophy.

Before the travel he dreams about, the national parks he collects, twenty-seven of them in four years, and the trips abroad with his daughters, he talks about a memorial fund.

Years ago he and his sister lost a young nephew, and in his memory they started a nonprofit that ran a barbecue competition in southern Indiana for about a decade and put the proceeds toward vocational scholarships for students at their county high schools.

That, he says, is where a good part of the money would go, back into the thing his family built out of its hardest loss.

He believes the BBQ World Cup is the best thing to happen to his sport in a long time, a tournament with a real prize that has, in his words, put a lot of life back into competition barbecue, and he is happy to call it the Super Bowl of the thing he loves.

When his name gets called in Las Vegas, and Ransom fully intends to make sure it does this time, he will walk out to Fort Minor's "Remember the Name," with Stan beside him the way it has been since 2013.

Forty-seventh out of fifty to the floor of the World Cup, a two-man team from a town called Boon Vegas, cooking for $1,000,000 in the real one.

Sources

Alby Ransom, Road to 1 Million qualifier interview with Shannon Pruitt (BBQ World Cup). BWC Qualified Pitmasters Tracker (Scuffletown Smokers, Alby Ransom, KCBS World Open, Reserve Grand Champion). The Lynchburg Times, "Scuffletown Smokers Wins The Jack" (35th Jack Daniel's World Championship Invitational Barbecue, Lynchburg, Tennessee, October 12, 2024, Grand Champion, score 702.8228; co-founder Stan Metzger; Boonville, Indiana). Team-name history, categories and world titles, practice method, the Smoke on the Shores lesson, family, and charitable plans per Ransom's qualifier interview. Hero photo: Alby Ransom, Scuffletown Smokers (BBQ United).