If you had to pick one lump charcoal to winter over with what would it be?

Yeah well my dad can beat up your dad

Guys just remember in the end that good lump charcoal is a 100% all natural product.  There's no way to ensure it's going to be perfect every time no matter how hard anyone tries.  The only guarantees for 100% conformity with no dust or rocks is to buy briquettes--a highly manufactured and unnatural product.

We try our best to get it right every time, to every consumer........but after the pallets leave our crossdock in St. Louis, our quality control unfortunately ends.  And much like Lay's potato chips or a box of Frosted Flakes, the agitation from every bump and every in the road and every move on the shelf, breaks the product down.

Just like the potato chips again, good lump charcoal is brittle.  Rockwood is kilned to higher carbon content to keep the smoke and ash production down--it also allows you to get higher temps much faster; and maintain very low temps with a minimal amount of O2.  Kilning it less would save a ton of money and keep the chunks in tact, but it would also produce a much lower performance "lump charcoal" (more like wood right before it becomes charcoal.)

We listen to what everyone wants and try to meet those standards as best we can.  The kamado crowd wants big chunks, the Weber or gravity fed smoker guys want medium to smaller chunks.  Some people want smoke, some people don't.  Nobody wants rocks, but that's impossible to promise.  I'm a BGE guy, so that's where I try to steer it's performance.

"Bad bags" can happen, but I'm baffled when someone says multiple bags are bad.  It's not that I do not believe them, I just cannot piece together how X number of bad bags would wind up together.  With the path that the charcoal takes from the kilns, to cooling, to sifting, to bagging, to palletizing, it's been thoroughly mixed.

As far as the dust and chips go, that's shipping.  The bags I take home for myself have less than a cup or two of fines in the bottom.  I've also had bags that have gotten run over by trucks or dropped 15-20ft--there's maybe a 1-2 pounds of fines, but no big deal.  It's still usable.  Just pour them off to the side of the firebox, put them down in the ash tray, or save them for your fireplace / wood stove.  Plenty of BTU's there--don't throw them away.  And as far as the smaller chunks go, they burn the same as the big chunks as long as the O2 can get to them.  Upgrade your fire grate, and you'll never have the problem again.

I digress by saying again, it's an all natural product produced by using the same methods used for thousands of years.  Everybody has their favorites, and that's fine.  In the end use whatever is the best bang for your buck and readily available.  If that's Rockwood, cool.  Know I've got your back if you have a question or a problem.

After 8 cooks, I am looking to now replenish my lump as well. Seeing some of the suggestions here, where is the best place to buy lump for the BGE? Please do not tell me Home Depot.

Lump discussions is very similar to the Ford - Chevy debate. Everybody has their own opinion and can't be swayed. BTW - My Rockwood will get more Faienheit per pound than you Royal Oak )

Austin Egghead said:

RW or OO. RO has been relegated to use for clean burns.

Joan and @Fred19Flintstone - regarding RO, had the chance to pick up some US RO on sale last spring (Orange bag) Canuck RO is in a blue bag, says Star Grill on it. Used the first of the US stuff a couple of weeks ago. I now may know why our US cousins often consider RO as the ugly step child. There was no comparison in the quality, not the sizes, the actual quality of the US RO was terrible. Maybe it was a bad couple of bags - have two more so we will see. 

Maccool said:

I don't know anything about the quality of lump charcoal manufacturing. What I know is the amazing amount of dust I see when I empty the bag of RW and to a lesser extent OO into my charcoal bucket and what I see when I get to the bottom of that bucket. When I buy BGE charcoal from the local Ace, or RO from the local Home Depot, I get little or no dust and pretty uniform lumps, quality of the charcoal notwithstanding. When I open the boxes from Firecraft, I get a lot of little chips, some big lumps, and a LOT of dust. Nothing to do with the quality of manufacturing, I only know the end result. For me, buying OO or RW means that it has to come from Firecraft, and it comes with a lot of dust and chips that fall through my Kick Ash firebox grate. Hard to feel the RW/OO love under those circumstances. BGE is about $30 a bag around here, RO from Home Depot is substantially cheaper. I've tried the big four brands. Looks like RO for me.

Definitely not trying to argue with you by any means but I think you nailed it with the shipping comment. I have used at least 25 bags of RW that I pick up from a Brick and Mortar dealer that happens to be on one of my sales route and 10 bags of OO that either came from @henapple or @letz4wheel straight from Harps and I could put the dust from everything in a quart jar. I just know once I started using these two lumps the complaints of too "smokey" stopped from the wife.

Maccool said:

Nothing to do with the quality of manufacturing, I only know the end result. For me, buying OO or RW means that it has to come from Firecraft, and it comes with a lot of dust and chips that fall through my Kick Ash firebox grate. Hard to feel the RW/OO love under those circumstances.

When they fall through the grate, they're just landing in the ash tray.  As soon as you get a hot fire in the firebox, and ash or embers fall into the tray, those fines are going to burn.  You're not losing anything.  If you take softball size chunk of charcoal and crush it into a fine powder, the volume is less, but the weight and BTU's are the same.  I'm not saying we can sell you a bag of 20# of fines and you should be happy, but even a pound or two shouldn't change the dynamic of your cooking experience in the long run.

If you're having good luck with a brand and can get it locally for a decent price, I'm not going to try to talk you out of it.  I just try to dispel some of the "negatives" the internet has propagated against lump charcoal in general.  There's a lot things worse than fines, rocks, and holes in bags--they are plywood and under kilned wood that go in the bag.......not to mention the slave labor used produce it.

I'd use what I normally use, kamado.Joe lump

stlcharcoal said:

When they fall through the grate, they're just landing in the ash tray.  As soon as you get a hot fire in the firebox, and ash or embers fall into the tray, those fines are going to burn.  You're not losing anything.  If you take softball size chunk of charcoal and crush it into a fine powder, the volume is less, but the weight and BTU's are the same.  I'm not saying we can sell you a bag of 20# of fines and you should be happy, but even a pound or two shouldn't change the dynamic of your cooking experience in the long run.

If you're having good luck with a brand and can get it locally for a decent price, I'm not going to try to talk you out of it.  I just try to dispel some of the "negatives" the internet has propagated against lump charcoal in general.  There's a lot things worse than fines, rocks, and holes in bags--they are plywood and under kilned wood that go in the bag.......not to mention the slave labor used produce it.

Yes, this is all well-known. It doesn't change the end result....somewhere between your shipping dock and my Big Green Egg...a noticeable amount of charcoal is getting pounded into dust in the bag. BTU's aside, it makes for messy grilling, more frequent attention to the ash dump, and an irritating cloud of dust that settles around on the deck every time I empty a bag into the storage container. End result....the kind of mess that drives some people to go with propane for their outdoor grilling. Not me...I'm a die-hard charcoal fan. I just like to minimize the irritation factor.

Mattman3969 said:

Maccool said:

 I just know once I started using these two lumps the complaints of too "smokey" stopped from the wife.

Trust me...I SWEAR I hear you! and have OFTEN heard your wife's complaint about this brand and that brand - but when I ask my usual questions I hear the usual answers...my experience is even with the crappiest of the cheap crappy lump newbies are trying to cook with it too soon! Even guys who say they have been egging for 5 years blah blah! Old habits are most times the hardest to break - especially for guys with hard heads!  As the usual wisdom is shared "wait until the smoke has cleared!" This solution isn't rated up there in the rocket science grouping for hopeful Ph.d. grads, but works more often than not.

Humphrey's

Mattman3969 said:

@rrp - that may be very well true for some but I was very aware of bad smoke and when it was good to cook on before I switched brands, hell you even talked about about how OO burned so cleaned you used it right outside a friend $1,000,000 house because you didn't want to smoke up the house or the pies you were eggin. In my experience RW & OO burn cleaner than anything I have tried. Like I said it's a Ford vs Chevy thing and each their own. A quote from earlier in the discussion
"Haven't yet had a chance to try RW, but I love OO. I baked 3 chocolate cakes on an egg Thursday for a local fund raiser just 10 feet from the front door of a million door home. I didn't want to risk smoke in the cakes nor in their home so I used OO and never received one complaint!"

yup, you quoted me dead to rights...Besides being close to that front door egging I also had a short picture of time. It was not a friends home, but it was a hired gig. I just knew that I could count on OO to burn clean, without smoke, and stay hot and stable during the 5 hour time frame without any other issues. Sorry if I pissed you off!

stlcharcoal said:

I respect your opinion 100%......and believe me, if we could eliminate the dust/fines, we would.  But with that high carbon content charcoal, it's impossible.  I believe we would lose a lot more customers if the charcoal was kilned less.

Again, if you're happy with your brand, good deal.  I'm not putting it down, or trying to steering anyone away from it......just defending our brand based of my 20 yrs of Egg'ing with many many brands of lump charcoal.

I still don't think you're getting it. It's not opinion...it's direct observation. I've been buying lump charcoal in large quantities for a decade. The part that you're not getting is that it's not a manufacturing problem, it's a shipping problem. No reason for you to feel butthurt. It's not you. Dust/fines is never a problem for me when I buy charcoal from Ace Hardware or Home Depot. When I buy it from Firecraft and have it shipped by FedEx, it comes loaded with dust. My decision to stick with RO isn't based on the superiority of the charcoal, it's based on the fact that I can't buy charcoal online, have it shipped, and not have a lot of extra dust, or ripped bags, or small pieces. You may be putting the charcoal into the bag in pristine condition. Maybe it's the people you ship with, or the way that FireCraft's warehouse people kick the bags around while storing or loading, or the people at FedEx that beat the stuff up. Whatever. The end result is a lot of dust in my bag that very probably wasn't there when you filled that bag.

Forensically, I'd have to say that it's less likely to be a FedEx problem. I buy the stuff in quantities that come in a big cardboard box with 6 bags stacked in it. When it gets here, the box is undamaged - no bends, tears, holes, or creases. When I go to open the box, I find broken bags, bags with holes in them, and bags with a LOT of dust.

I'm looking forward to getting my half pallet to see these positive and negative results. @maccool may have an issue and it seems to be due to shipping not manufacturing. Of course @stlcharcoal‌ will have pristine bags as he just loads his from factory to his car. Lump will have issues with handling as the potato chip analogy. Here is an idea. Let's all buy pallets of our favorite lump, and ship direct to our homes, thus cutting out the middle men doing the handling. Palletized, shrink wrapped tightly on to said pallet should alleviate the fines issues.

If you want to shop local, the Wicked Good is wicked good.