B.R.A. Barbecue Team: Brazil's First BBQ World Cup Qualifier

The two men who make up the front line of B.R.A. Barbecue Team live four thousand miles apart, and they became a team the way a lot of good things in barbecue happen, over smoke and a shared table.

It was a Jack Daniel's barbecue festival in Brazil, back around 2017, and both of them were cooking for a crowd that ran to a thousand people. Lucas Cesar was already one of the most decorated competition cooks in the country. Romulo Germano was a veterinarian with a master's in meat science and a growing obsession.

They kept crossing paths at Brazil's barbecue festivals, kept trading notes, and somewhere in there they stopped being two cooks who admired each other and started being a team.

In April 2027, the two of them will roll into Las Vegas as the first Brazilian team on the road to the BBQ World Cup, cooking against ninety-nine other of the best teams on earth for $1,000,000.

How B.R.A. Barbecue Team Qualified at Barbaros BBQ

They earned the ticket at home.

B.R.A. finished Grand Champion at Barbaros BBQ, the largest barbecue gathering in Brazil and a qualifier for the BBQ World Cup, a single spot in Vegas riding on one weekend in Sao Paulo.

It was a fitting place to punch the ticket. Barbaros is where the Brazilian scene gathers, and B.R.A. beat the room in its own backyard.

Why the Team Is Called B.R.A.

The name is a small joke that turned into a banner.

B.R.A. is simply the initials for Brazil, the way USA stands in for the United States, and the team wears them with the dots deliberately added. Spell it without the punctuation and an English reader sees a different word entirely, so the dots went on the first time they competed in the States.

"We better add the dots," Romulo remembers deciding, laughing about it now.

Underneath the wordplay it is the plainest name a team could pick. They are the Brazil barbecue team, and they cook like it.

Who Are Lucas Cesar and Romulo Germano

Romulo goes by Romy, which is easier on English tongues, and he is the meat man in every sense.

His day job is veterinary reproduction work, and his graduate training was in meat science, so when the team needs to pick the beef for a contest, that call is his. He knows what he is looking at down to the muscle.

Around the start of 2024 his career carried him north to Amarillo, Texas, in the middle of the Panhandle, which he describes with real affection as the middle of nowhere with no water and a great place to be.

From that outpost he became the team's American beachhead, the man with a home base and a trailer and a set of pits already parked stateside when the rest of the crew flies up from Brazil.

Lucas is the head cook and, in Romulo's words, the brains of the operation, the one who assembles everyone and points them in the same direction.

He lives near Sao Paulo with his wife Jessica and their two kids, a young son and a daughter, and he lives barbecue around the clock. When he is not competing he consults for restaurants, which means his craft pays his bills, a fact Romulo mentions with open admiration.

Lucas has been at this for roughly a decade, and his reputation travels.

When he flew to Australia to compete, the locals took one look at his results and started calling him the brisket guy, a nickname that followed him home.

Brisket is the meat B.R.A. plants its flag on.

"Brisket is the best, no doubt," Romulo says, and the scores back it up, from Australia to Texas to Brazil.

Behind the two cooks who will stand at the pits in Vegas is a deeper bench, because B.R.A. was built as a team of specialists rather than a pair with helpers.

There is Carlos Hideki, the one Romulo calls the magician, who layers the umami flavors and ties the flavors together. There is Eddie, a chef, and Diogo, who owns a restaurant in Rio de Janeiro, and Jose, another veterinarian who joined in 2025.

Nearly every member found the others at Brazil's barbecue festivals, and nearly every member earns at least part of his living from the craft.

The World Cup rules put only two cooks on the line, so it will be Lucas and Romulo at the pits, but the plan is for the whole crew to come to Vegas, flags in hand, ready to turn a competition into a celebration.

That instinct, to bring the party, is the thread that runs through everything B.R.A. does.

Romulo lights up talking about the international villages at big American contests, where the Brazilian tent is the loud, joyful one. "We always bring joy cooking," he says, and it is not a line, it is a competitive edge.

What the Brazilians can do over fire tends to stop other cooks in their tracks.

At the festivals back home they cook whole beef ribs, forty-pound slabs, open flame, for crowds in the thousands, and they carry that fluency into the American categories, mixing a Brazilian hand with a Kansas City rulebook.

B.R.A. Barbecue Team's Wins in Brazil and the United States

The results have piled up on both sides of the equator.

In 2025, B.R.A. earned its way to the Jack Daniel's Invitational in Lynchburg, one of the most prestigious contests in the sport, by winning the KCBS Brazil contest, then went to Tennessee and took first place in the open chef's choice with a plate of beef ribs, the team's biggest win yet on American soil.

At the Champions Barbecue Alliance world final they finished as the top international team, beating a long list of established names and cracking the overall top twenty, a result Romulo still savors because so many of the cooks they passed were people they had long looked up to.

In 2026 they added a first place at KCBS Brazil, and they are pointed back toward the Jack and the American Royal, learning the American circuit one cold, windy contest at a time.

They have paid the dues that go with being the visiting team.

At the American Royal, while the American crews rolled in with RV trailers and full setups, B.R.A. worked out of a canopy tent and a couple of drums, cooking through autumn cold and fifty-mile-an-hour wind and rain. Romulo brought his wife and his dog to that one, and the dog, at least, loved every minute.

Each trip they got a little more comfortable, borrowed a little less, and now that Romulo keeps a full rig in Amarillo, the team that once showed up with nothing arrives ready.

The family travels when it can. Lucas leans on Jessica and the kids, Romulo on his wife, and the sponsor that keeps the beef coming, Snake River Farms, gets a warm shout whenever the team talks about who has their back.

Ask them who the greatest of all time is and both men land in the same place, on Phil Breeden of LC BBQ and on Fred Robles, two cooks they respect enough to name in the same breath.

Breeden, as it happens, is a fellow BBQ World Cup qualifier, so the men B.R.A. admires most will be in the same field in Vegas.

That is the culture they keep coming back to, a sport where you can chase your heroes and shake their hands in the same weekend.

What B.R.A. Barbecue Team Would Do With $1,000,000

For now the ticket is in their pocket, and they let themselves dream a little.

If B.R.A. wins the $1,000,000, the plan is to open a barbecue restaurant in America, and they already have a name ready, a pun only a team half-run by a cattle vet could love. They want to call it Cowdy, like howdy, but cow.

Romulo, who has spent his career around cattle, says he has his half of it figured out already. Lucas would move to the States to help run it.

It is the kind of plan that sounds like a joke until you hear how quickly they answer, and then you realize they have thought about it more than they let on.

When their names get called at the BBQ World Cup and Shakira's "Waka Waka" starts to play them to the stage, do not expect them to walk up quietly.

B.R.A. brings the party. They always have.

Sources

Lucas Cesar and Romulo Germano, B.R.A. Barbecue Team, Road to 1 Million qualifier interview with Shannon Pruitt (BBQ World Cup). BWC Qualified Pitmasters Tracker: Grand Champion, Barbaros BBQ, Sao Paulo, Brazil (team #7, B.R.A. Barbecue Team, head cook Lucas Cesar).

BBQ United team profile (member-written): B.R.A. Barbecue Team, Sao Paulo, Brazil; sanctioning bodies KCBS, CBA, IBCA, SCA; favorite categories brisket, chicken, pork, ribs, steak; tagline "Born in Brazil. Guided by God. Built to Win."

Meet the Field: Every Team Qualified for the BBQ World Cup, BBQ United.

Barbaros BBQ, Brazil's largest barbecue gathering and a BBQ World Cup qualifier (Sao Paulo, May 2026).

Photo: B.R.A. Barbecue Team.