Royal rock

Welcome to the world of natural lump charcoal. They all have occasional foreign bodies. Some worse than others. 

get a rock or something now and then, never anything that size

Yes, when I used to use Royal Oak, but not as much now that I use Rockwood.

nope. not that i've noticed anyway. RO (mostly) and WG for nearly six years now. then again, I just dump and light. maybe if I examined each piece? but even during the extremely rare clean out, i don't recall ever seeing an unburned rock. or any other foreign substance.

BTW, what are the bucket and box for?

I’ll see your rock and raise you a meteorite.... from the same bag of Royal Choke, a few years ago - the squares are 1”. 

I have had crushed beer cans (no not the ones I drank), railroad nail spike and rocks over the past few years.  I think most were from RO but I have seen this in other brands as well.  

Skiddymarker said:

@robnybbq - beer can, first time ever heard that! Do you have a return for refund in your area? Kinda like a 5 or 10 cent discount on lump. Railway spike is scary - makes you wonder if a tie was in that bag...

Unlikely......no reason to kiln one of those when they're worth a lot more than scrap hardwood slabs.  More like someone nailed it into a tree decades ago and the tree grew around it, encapsulating it.  Knotty chunks get rejected by the mill and they're sold for charcoal or mulch.  Same goes with the rocks.

There's really no way around them without inspecting and weighing every single chunk of charcoal in the bag.  10-20x longer to fill a bag and I can't even imagine what it would cost.  Much cheaper to overfill the bags by .4-.6# to keep the state's weights & measures happy, and cover the occasional rock, metal banding, etc. that may get into the bag.

for those wondering where the REAL Stike is