Want to know how to catch lightning in a bottle?

Get an endorsement from Matt Pittman, the award-winning pitmaster and founder of Meat Church. But you can’t do that without a damn good product, and that’s precisely what Rosewood Block has.

Tyler Rose created Rosewood Block along with this wife, Kayla, a couple years ago because he saw a need to be met in the barbecue industry.

“I always noticed that it takes a good amount of money and investment to get into barbecue and then I watched people putting their work on a bamboo cutting board or a plastic cutting board,” Rose said. “I was like, this is an opportunity. You spent 16 hours cooking that brisket and here you are putting it on a made in China cutting board or these little cut up plastic boards.”

So he reached out to his buddy James Brown of Smoke & Biscuit Co. and told him he was going to build him a Texas flag block. That first block was made out of cedar, post oak, and walnut from the Rose family land in Northern Arkansas.

Tyler hadn’t planned on getting into the cutting board business, but he grew up in a family of woodworkers and built several pieces of furniture for his house. With a full-time job in cardiac device sales, Rose devotes his nights and weekends to carrying on that family passion.

“My dad was a high school shop teacher and my grandpa had a wood shop behind their house and I remember playing in it as a kid,” Rose said. “He would make toys for us out of wood and I can still remember the smell of walnut from when I was a kid. It still reminds me of that.”

While the woodworking came natural, he learned a lot from that first stab at a board, such as needing kiln dried wood — or at least wood that is air dried far longer than that was — because post oak is so porous.

Naturally, like any entrepreneur would, he moved his cars out to the driveway and built his own kiln in the garage to dry his own wood. But he quickly figured out that it was better to source the kiln-dried wood elsewhere and devote his time and space into creating the best quality blocks he could make.

“I feel like a lot of folks who do woodworking probably look at cutting boards and they think it’s not necessarily a challenge,” Rose said. “Or they take it to the extreme and they do these ornate patterns – and those are cool – but I think for us we like the simplicity of the wood and we don’t use any dyes or paints. We always use the natural wood and we pick the grains and the arrangement of the wood to kind of give it its flavor and even color.”

That’s part of what sets Rosewood Block apart from other cutting boards on the market.

For one, as a part of the barbecue community himself, Rose has a good grasp of what barbecuers want. That’s why he’s working with Pittman to develop add-ons such as the chef’s knife magnet that was rolled out this summer. And the larger blocks that are specifically sized to be manhandled by pitmasters and backyard cooks alike.

Above all, it’s the quality of the blocks, which are all handmade using only the highest grade cuts of hardwood, where Rosewood Block truly stands out.

“People are putting money into this, so we want to make sure we get you a handmade, high-quality product,” Rose said. “There are other manufacturers out there that make boards that have a good reputation but you can look at them and know that they’re machine made. That’s not to say that they aren’t good — they’re probably still good blocks — but I think the barbecue community appreciates the fact that these are still built by hand.”

That team that does the building is a family business. In addition to his wife, Kayla, who runs operations and the artistic side of the logos and epoxy inlays, Rose brought his dad out of retirement. His mom runs the CNC machines, cutting out logos and special designs, and together, Tyler’s parents manage the main production facility which sits on their land — that same land they initially sourced their wood from along Bull Shoals Lake.

Rose also has a couple of cousins, Baylei and Megan, as well as his cousin’s husband, Jason, building blocks, performing quality control, and helping run the shop. James Brown, who received that very first Texas flag block, is also now a co-owner and provides valuable input, brainstorming, and support.

So how did Rosewood Block go from a single Texas flag block for a buddy to pumping out dozens of blocks a month, including for some of the biggest names in barbecue, music, and sports? Well, that’s where that lightning in a bottle comes in.

“James had crossed paths with Pittman, so I was like, ‘I’m just going to send him one’,” Rose explained. “He might just go, ‘what in the world is this’ and move on, but we were going to send him one to see if he liked it. Sure enough, we sent it to him, he opened it up, and he liked it.”

Rose recalled the moment when Pittman posted a photo of the block on Instagram and Rosewood Block’s account blew up. The relationship grew from there and Rose has provided several more blocks for Pittman that have been featured in Meat Church’s instructional videos.

“To this day he’ll do a Facebook Live video and he’ll mention us or he’ll have one of our boards and he’ll just say something and I won’t even know sometimes, and I’ll just start getting a bunch of followers and a bunch of messages and a bunch of orders,” Rose said. “So I’ll message him and make a joke like ‘did you just move the earth?’ or something dumb like that, and he’s like ‘yeah, I just did a training video’. It’s just wild, the influence that he has, obviously he’s just big time in the industry. So we owe him a giant debt of gratitude for his support.”

In addition to the chef’s knife magnet add-on that Rose developed with Pittman’s input, which allows barbecuers to attach their knife to the side of the block for easy carrying, Rose has recently started selling kiln dried smoking chunks — another useful product for barbecuers.

Rose has been using the cherry, maple, and walnut scraps from the shop on his own smokes for months and found them to produce a slow burn with good smoke, so now he’s offering them on a limited basis. He pointed out that they are completely food safe with no stains, paints, or glues on them.

No matter how many accessories Rosewood Block adds, it’s still all about the blocks, which can be ordered end grain or edge grain. End grain, Rose says, is like a million fibers sticking up if you look at the wood microscopically, and when you cut down into it, those fibers separate and then go back together, which is better on your knife.

A typical block takes 6-8 weeks to build, from specking out the initial design and wood type to joining, planing, cutting, laminating, cross-cutting, re-laminating, re-planing, several rounds of sanding, wetting, and more sanding, laser-cutting logos and filling with epoxy, and finally, oiling.

When you understand just how hands-on the process is, it’s easy to appreciate the craftsmanship. The only problem is, sometimes that handmade quality is just too good.

“We have to convince people a lot of times that you can cut on these things because we get the comment a lot — ‘I can’t cut on these things, they’re too pretty’,” Rose laughed. “You better cut on that thing, that’s what it’s for!”

If you don’t already have a Rosewood Block, what are you waiting for? Order now and use code **PASATIEMPO** (exactly like that) for a special 10% discount. Show us your order confirmation and we’ll send you a complementary bottle of our brand new Down With the Swine rub as well (while supplies last).