BBQ World Cup Qualifier: Bill & Andrea Heyen

Bill Heyen grows corn and soybeans on the same central Illinois ground his family has worked for years. For most of his life, that was the plan and the whole of it. Then came a camper, a fire, and a wife who loved to compete as much as he did.

Bill and Andrea Heyen cook as Triple H BBQ, out of Gillespie, Illinois. On August 14 the husband-and-wife team won Grand Champion at BBQ & Fly-In on the River in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, out of a field of 83 teams. That finish earned one of two seats into the first BBQ World Cup, where 100 teams from around the world will cook next spring in Las Vegas for $1,000,000.

A camper, a fire, and a five-rack cook-off

Before barbecue, Bill was in motorsports. It was a hard life to square with a marriage and young kids, always gone, so he stepped away, bought a camper, and started spending weekends cooking over an open fire.

Someone talked him into a local rib cook-off, the kind where they hand each team five racks and turn them loose. He was hooked, and Andrea was too. These days, Bill says, it is as much her driving off to go cook as it is him.

Their first KCBS contest came in 2016, in Branson, Missouri. Coming out of organized racing, Bill wanted the structure of it, and he wanted to measure himself against the best. That first weekend was a scramble. They ran around the site just trying to get all four meats turned in on time.

Improvement came the only way it does in barbecue, by cooking and cooking again until the timing lives in your hands. Bill leaned on a community that tends to share. He did not even realize competitors trimmed their meat before they arrived. As he puts it, you do not know what you do not know. Now Triple H teaches classes of their own, one or two students at a time, hands-on, so people can feel it, see it, and smell it.

How Triple H got its name

The name is older than the winning. It goes back to that very first rib cook-off, the Staunton Rib Fest, when Bill's dad came along to cook and Andrea brought her maiden name, Hill, to the table.

Three surnames, all starting with the same letter. Hill, and Heyen, and Heyen. Triple H. Bill's father only cooked with them that one time. He would rather stay home and watch the boys, and he has ever since.

One of the most consistent teams around

What began as a weekend hobby turned into a serious operation. In a heavy year Triple H has run close to 40 contests, and even now they cook 25 to 30 a season.

The resume filled in fast. In September 2021, in only the team's third Grand Champion win, Bill took the top prize at the American Royal Invitational in Kansas City, out of a field of 185 teams and in just his second time competing at the sport's biggest gathering. The next year, Triple H finished third overall in the 2022 KCBS Team of the Year standings, a season-long measure of the most consistent teams around.

Bill cooks on a stick burner and thinks in Kansas City terms. Brisket and ribs are the team's strongest categories most years, though it moves around. A couple of seasons back, chicken was their best meat.

He is wary of chasing a wow. In the four-meat associations, he says, you can flirt with the edges of what a judge expects but not cross them. Try to wow one table and you offend another. The goal is to offend no one. For Bill, great barbecue comes down to a single word. Balance.

On the road, the team runs with backing from Korte Meat Processing in Highland, the Atlanta BBQ Store, Heavy Smoke BBQ, and Smokin Ghost BBQ.

The road to Vegas

The event has one of the more charming names on the circuit. It grew up around a small local airport, where private pilots would fly in for the weekend. During COVID the cook-off moved out to the airfield to get it out of downtown, and the fly-in name stuck.

The qualifier itself was a clinic in that balance. At Excelsior Springs, Triple H turned in a perfect 180 in ribs, good for second in the category, added a third-place chicken and a fourth-place brisket, and edged BBQ Maestros for the Grand Champion by less than six points across the 83-team field.

It nearly happened months earlier. Back in April, at a contest in Osage City, Kansas, Triple H finished third overall, half a point shy of the reserve spot and the World Cup seat that came with it.

Bill is the first to name the role of luck. Turn a brisket box in twenty seconds later, draw a different judging table, and the weekend ends differently. You have to cook well and get lucky, he says. Getting to Vegas had been the goal for the year, and missing by half a point in the spring only sharpened it.

None of the field scares him. You cannot be the best, he likes to say, until you beat the best, and he means it as a welcome more than a boast. Murphysboro, another BBQ World Cup qualifier close to home, is one of his favorites, a place where the atmosphere, he says, is just different.

Faith, family, and fire

Triple H is a family before it is a team. The tagline the Heyens cook under says it plainly. Faith. Family. Fire.

Off the trailer, Bill serves as vice president of the Macoupin County Farm Bureau, one more role in a life already stacked with them.

Andrea grew up in Godfrey, Illinois, about 40 minutes from the farm. The two met at a bar one night and, as she tells it, never really separated after. She works as a medical coder for rural health clinics across central Illinois, and she is in the trailer for every cook. Between the barbecue and the farm and three boys, the oldest twenty and the youngest twelve, their life is full.

The operation only works because the family carries it. Bill's brother picks up the slack on the farm when the team is on the road. His parents and Andrea's mother watch the boys once school is back in session. They could not do it, Bill says, without their family.

There is a ritual before every cook. Once Andrea is out at the site, the couple bows their heads, goes still, and gives thanks for the chance to be there. When they have skipped it, Bill says, because they got busy and forgot, that is usually when the weekend goes sideways.

Now the farm couple from Gillespie is pointed at Las Vegas, at 100 teams and $1,000,000. Bill already knows his walk-on song, Chris Janson's "Who's Your Farmer." He knows who he wants beside him on that stage, too. Andrea. And he knows what he would do if Triple H walked away with the money. He would pay down the farm. He likes Ronald Reagan's old line that a Vegas craps table is a guaranteed income next to farming, and then he gets back to work, because on a farm there is always more of it.

Sources

BBQ & Fly-In on the River official KCBS results, Excelsior Springs, Missouri, August 14, 2026. Gillespie farmer crowned barbecue grand champion, FarmWeek, on Triple H BBQ's 2021 American Royal Invitational title. The Smoke Sheet, The 2021 American Royal Showed Competition BBQ Is Back. Team facts from the Road to 1 Million interview with Bill and Andrea Heyen and the team's BBQ United profile. Photo courtesy of Triple H BBQ.