Sometime in 2005, readers began noticing that in addition to the Royal Oak lump charcoal that was made in Brazil, a third new type of Royal Oak lump charcoal was appearing in stores around America. This charcoal was labeled "Made in Argentina." Probably the most prevalent comment we heard was how badly this charcoal sparks. Well, we finally were able to obtain a bag through the good graces of a reader who stuffed a 20-pound bag into his luggage and flew to Naked Whiz Headquarters to deliver it. Unfortunately, a minor house remodeling project distracted us until now, but let's see how this lump from Argentina made out.
You can see our observations to the right as to how to identify this charcoal and distinguish it from the domestic charcoal and the charcoal from Brazil. As you can see, the bag contains the satisfaction guarantee and the somewhat misleading statement from their U.S. bags that the charcoal is made from "either oak, hickory, maple and other hardwoods." We strongly suspect that the bag contains 100% "other hardwoods." We found only 1 rock, and no scrap in the charcoal, but we did find a piece of plastic string in the charcoal.
As you can see from the table below, the distribution of sizes was very good. There were a large number of large pieces (although we forgot to include a photograph of the largest pieces) and the chips and dust were well below average at 7.8% by weight. One more time we'll get on our soapbox and point out that although this charcoal was shipped from Argentina to Royal Oak, shipped from Royal Oak to a Gordon Foods distribution center, from there to a Gordon Foods store, and finally brought to Raleigh and subject to airline baggage handlers, the bag contained a low percentage of chips and dust. We think that the manufacturer's screening of the original product is more important than the handling of the bags in determining how much chips and dust you get. But we digress....
| Large |
4.5 pounds |
21.9% |
| Medium |
6.1 pounds |
29.5% |
| Small |
8.4 pounds |
40.8% |
| Chips/Dust |
1.6 pounds |
7.8% |
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|
|
| Total |
20.6 pounds |
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When lighting, the charcoal sparked moderately initially, but there was no popping. The sparking died down after a while. The charcoal took an average 4.5 sheets of newspaper to start in our chimney starter test. The charcoal burns with a mild and pleasant woodsy sort of smell, not the perfumey smell that you sometimes get from South American hardwood charcoal. In our max temperature test, the charcoal burned at a somewhat surprisingly low temperature of 750 degrees, although this is still plenty hot for most grilling/searing needs.
So what about this supposed sparking and/or popping issue? Frankly we didn't see much of an issue. We observed the charcoal starting and burning in our chimney starter test. We observed it when we added fresh charcoal to already burning charcoal in our maximum temperature test. We observed it being started with a MAPP torch, and then as it came up to 400 degrees in our burntime test. While it seem to have some moderate sparking when the charcoal is igniting, it seems to die down to insignificant levels after it gets started. We have seen domestic charcoals spark far worse than this one when lighting with a MAPP torch. During the maximum temperature test, only a small number of sparks came out of the bottom vent, and during our burntime test at 400 degrees, the charcoal did not spark after the fire got going. And at no time did we ever observe any real popping where large hot particles of charcoal were shooting about. Granted we are working with a sample of one bag here, but we did not observe anything worth mentioning.
The burntime on this charcoal was low compared to other charcoals we have tested and the ash production was high compared to other charcoals. The price is good, the distribution of sizes is very good, but this charcoal falls down a bit when it comes to burntime and ash production. So we give this charcoal our Average rating.
