Smokey Blue Bar-B-Q thrives off-grid in an electronic society
Bob Saar
for The Hawk Eye
In this day of electronic communication lanes that are wide open 24/7, Derrick Middleton is a businessman who lives what you might call a hand-to-mouth life: he smokes up some mean barbecue.
But his customers have no way of knowing when or where Smokey Blue Bar-B-Q s blue trailer will be on any given day, so it s all word-of-mouth.
Middleton s home base in Burlington is, more or less, the Shell gas station at Roosevelt Avenue and Division Street, where he parks his bright blue smoker-trailer and serves up tasty lunches: slow apple- or cherrywood-smoked barbecue with southern sides.