You may be asking yourself if you haven't seen this charcoal somewhere before? We certainly were. A distributor sent this to us and cleared up the confusion. This is the same company that used to produce Nature's Own Basque Hardwood Lump Charcoal. It is now labeled and sold as Basque Sugar Maple Charcoal. From the distributor we found out that there are a few changes. We found milling scrap in the Nature's Own charcoal. However, we learn:
"This is no longer possible as they sold the lumber plant. There is an important distinction between Basques Charcoal and many American Lump manufacturers, Basques only uses logs to make their charcoal and no slab wood so you are getting the heart of the tree compared to the outer section of wood and some bark. Basques is also now Rainforest Alliance and FSC Certified."
As usual, the first thing we do is dump the entire contents of the bag out for sorting. As you can see in the following table, there were very few large and medium pieces, a very large amount of small pieces, and quite a large amount of chips and dust. The amount of chips and dust ranks high compared to all other lump charcoals we have tested:
| Large |
1.3 pounds |
6.5% |
| Medium |
1.4 pounds |
12.5% |
| Small |
12.5 pounds |
64.9% |
| Chips/Dust |
3.1 pounds |
16.1% |
|
|
|
| Total |
18.3 pounds |
|
|
We would caution against too much concern regarding the size distribution. When we tested the original Nature's Own Basque charcoal, there were very good bags with lots of medium and large pieces, and there were bags that weren't so good with large amounts of small pieces. We also observed this same thing with Maple Leaf charcoal, which also contains a large amount of maple. Maple appears to produce more fragile charcoal than hickory and oak, and thus you often get bags like this one. If you like burning sugar maple lump charcoal, it's a small price to pay.
While sorting through the bag contents, as mentioned by the distributor, we found no milling scrap. There was a tiny amount of small uncarbonized pieces and we found one small piece of insulation in the bag.
In our chimney starter test, it took four sheets of newspaper to get the charcoal going, which is average compared to all other charcoals. There was no sparking or popping and the smell of the charcoal as it starts up is very mild. In our maximum temperature test, the charcoal burned at 1075°F which is very high compared to other charcoals. Again there was no sparking and popping and the smell of the smoke was again mild and pleasant. The fire spread relatively quickly and the charcoal came up to its maximum temperature in a very short time.
When we lit the charcoal with a MAP-Pro torch for our burn time test, there was very little sparking and again the fire spread relatively quickly. The charcoal burn time was very high compared to other charcoals and the amount of ash produced per hour of burntime was very low.
All in all, except for the size distribution of pieces, this charcoal excels in most categories. It burns almost forever with very little ash, burns extremely hot when called upon, and has a very mild and pleasant smoke. We give it our Recommended rating.
