Texas Brisket Now Sells for $38 a Pound as the Cattle Herd Hits a 75-Year Low

A fifteen-pound brisket that a Texas pitmaster paid about thirty dollars for a few years ago now runs north of a hundred dollars. That one cut, the slab of beef Texas barbecue built its whole reputation on, has turned into the most expensive thing on the pit. At Burnt Bean Co., the smokehouse in the small town of Seguin east of San Antonio that Texas Monthly ranked the best in the state, brisket has climbed to $38 a pound. The owners have said they may soon serve it only one day a week.

The reason has nothing to do with how anyone cooks. The national cattle herd has shrunk to its smallest size in roughly 75 years, worn down by years of drought, rising land costs, and ranchers thinning herds they can no longer afford to feed. Fewer cattle means less beef. Less beef means the wholesale price of brisket has jumped 28 percent in a single year.

The federal government tracks the squeeze in plain numbers. The USDA pegged the retail price of brisket at $7.53 a pound early this year, up seventeen percent from a year earlier. Push the line back to early 2020, when that same cut sold for $2.60 a pound, and the increase runs past 180 percent. Government forecasters expect the climb to continue through the rest of 2026.

The pain is not confined to the pit line. Retail beef reached record highs across the country this year, with ground beef and steaks both up double digits, a national sticker shock that has turned barbecue's signature cut into something close to a luxury. No cuisine leans on beef the way Texas barbecue does, so no cuisine feels the squeeze harder.

Diners feel it at the counter. Joints that once sold brisket by the generous half pound now trim portions, print market price on the board, and steer customers toward cheaper plates. A cut that stood for Texas abundance has become a line item pitmasters ration by the slice. Even the celebrated names have started treating the beef case like a vault.

How a throwaway cut became the crown

Brisket was not always the prize. For most of the last century it was a tough, cheap slab of chest muscle that butchers struggled to sell. Central Texas meat markets, many of them run by German and Czech families, smoked it low and slow to make it tender and move it before it spoiled. The barbecue came second to the grocery business.

The lineage runs through towns like Lockhart and Luling, where century-old markets such as Kreuz Market and City Market smoked shoulder and brisket beside the sausage case. Elgin built its name on sausage, the smaller Hill Country towns on smoked beef. The markets sold barbecue as a byproduct, a way to use every scrap of an animal at a time when nothing could be wasted. The pit was a tool of the grocery trade long before it anchored a dining destination.

That order flipped over the past fifteen years. When Aaron Franklin turned a trailer in Austin into a restaurant that drew hours-long lines and a James Beard award, brisket became the measure of a great pitmaster. The cut that once sold for pennies became the reason people waited in the heat. Joints across the state built their menus, and their names, on it. The same obsession now leaves them exposed, because the one thing everyone lines up for is the one thing whose price will not stop rising.

The joints that could not hold on

The math has already forced doors shut. Texas barbecue spots that closed this year include Brett's BBQ Shop, Kirby's BBQ, Sabar BBQ, and Wright on Taco & BBQ, each pointing to the cost of beef on the way out. For the ones still open, the margins have gone thin enough to feel dangerous.

Burnt Bean Co. shows how far up the ladder the strain reaches. Run by pitmasters Ernest Servantes and David Kirkland, two former competition champions who opened in Seguin in 2016, the joint earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand and the top spot on Texas Monthly's ranking of the whole state. When a smokehouse sitting at the summit of Texas barbecue is rationing the cut that made its name, the pressure below it is heavier still.

Justin Fourton knows that edge. He and his wife LeAnn grew Pecan Lodge from a stall in a Dallas farmers market in 2010 into one of the most celebrated smokehouses in the state, a Deep Ellum institution that helped define the modern Texas barbecue boom. Fourton has called the moment an existential crisis in the barbecue industry, and he is not reaching for a phrase.

In Houston, Russell Roegels runs Roegels Barbecue Co., a family joint known for a Czech-Texan spread and a beef rib the size of a forearm. He now pays $5.56 a pound at wholesale for brisket, and lifted his menu price about six percent to keep the plate from losing money. Every joint in the state is running some version of that same equation.

The strain has pulled in national cameras. Good Morning America and a run of business outlets have trained on Texas pitmasters this year, turning a regional trade into a national story about what happens when a beloved food outgrows its own economics. One owner distilled the mood for reporters in a single line, that any joint leaning on brisket is one bad week from closing.

The pitmasters betting on chicken

There is a way through, and it runs away from beef. Daniel Vaughn, the barbecue editor at Texas Monthly and the first full-time barbecue editor at any magazine, has spent the year making the case that the future sits on the rest of the menu. He ate 51 smoked chickens across the state to prove the point, and keeps steering diners toward the birds, the pork, and the sausage that joints like Helberg Barbecue in Waco have turned into destinations of their own.

The shift is practical. Chicken, pork shoulder, and house sausage cost a fraction of what brisket does, and a skilled pitmaster can make any of them sing. Some cooks are pulling flavor out of beef cheek and sausage ground from brisket trimmings, the cheap ends of the same animal. The best of them treat the price crisis as a reason to widen what Texas barbecue can be, not a reason to quit.

The bet is already paying off for some. Helberg Barbecue in Waco turned its smoked half chicken into a signature that draws its own line, proof that a bird can carry a joint the way brisket once did. Others lean on pork ribs, sausage links, and turkey, cuts that reward the same patient fire without the same crushing cost. The craft was never only about beef. It was about smoke, time, and salt, and those are still within reach.

Texas barbecue has always been a story about making something great out of what was cheap and overlooked. Brisket was proof of that, a discarded cut turned into the state's signature. The pitmasters who ride out this stretch will do it the way their forebears did, by finding the flavor in whatever the market has not priced out of reach. The smoke is not going anywhere. What comes off the pit is changing again.

Sources

Forbes: Rising Beef Prices Are Killing Off an American Classic; Meatingplace: Texas BBQ Burnt by Record-High Beef Prices; The Washington Post: Some of Texas's oldest barbecue joints close as meat prices skyrocket; Dallas Observer: An Existential Crisis in the BBQ Industry; Texas Monthly: The Best Smoked Chicken in Texas; Yahoo Finance: Texas BBQ Brisket Hits $40 a Pound as Cattle Herd Drops to 75-Year Low. Featured photo courtesy Serious Eats (Creative Commons).