The Best Charcoal for Grilling

We interviewed grilling experts including Doug Hanthorn of the The Naked Whiz, John Dawson of Patio Daddio BBQ, and Dennis Linkletter of Komodo Kamado. Although they had different recommendations for products, they all told us that consistency is paramount, so we focused on briquets, although we also found a lump wood charcoal option that we like.

In 2015, we focused our testing only on charcoal briquets. We assembled our list of contenders after researching reviews on Amazon, The Naked Whiz, and Patio Daddio BBQ, hunting down recommendations on forums like The BBQ Brethren, and looking at our own results from the previous year. That left us with seven main contenders.

I spent a day on my roof, burning through controlled batches of each one. In another part of our testing, we did side-by-side comparisons of individual brands from separate bags to test for uniformity. All brands performed nearly equally. We skipped self-lighting briquets because there’s no need to add petroleum distillates when a good charcoal chimney will do the job.

Although the fairest way to test charcoal is to weigh it out into equal piles to ensure uniform amounts of carbon despite differing densities, that isn’t the most realistic method. Because we assumed that most people don’t bother to weigh out their charcoal before using it, we instead measured our charcoal by volume, filling up our 250-cubic-inch chimney to the designated “full” line each time (like normal people).

Once we ignited the top pieces of charcoal, we poured the coals into one side of a standard 22.5-inch Weber One Touch Gold kettle grill and recorded a range of temperatures along the pile every five minutes using a Fluke Ti32 thermal imager, which Fluke generously loaned to us. Once the charcoal finished burning, we measured the ash production by volume. The grill remained uncovered during the burn, with the bottom vents half open. At 60 minutes, if charcoal was still burning, I gave the grill three solid shakes to see how the briquets were holding up. At this point, usually the charcoal pile was so small and covered with ash that if it were your grill, you probably would have added a new chimney’s worth if you wanted to continue grilling. For a few brands, this knocking around gave new life to the coals, and for others it was pretty much the end of the line.

We also performed a fairly subjective taste test with four friends as “food tasters” and several pounds of nearly identical premade ⅓-pound all-beef burgers from Western Beef. Our other testing goal (beyond taste) was to see how well done our burgers cooked over each charcoal. To that end we cooked each burger for four minutes on each side, cooking the burgers successively over the course of 40 minutes.

What we observed was that different charcoals gave off different radiations of heat despite having similar surface temperatures, and that certain charcoals imparted distinct flavors onto the burgers we cooked. For our tastes, none of the charcoals gave the food an acrid or otherwise bad flavor—but the ones with the highest searing heat gave the burgers the best flavor overall.

Our pick for all-around briquets suitable for just about any cooking situation is Royal Oak Classic Briquets. Sometimes called Ridge Briquets, these briquets burn almost as hot as—and last longer than—some of the best briquets we tested. Testers didn’t notice any off tastes from this charcoal, and we measured comparatively little ash mess after the briquets finished burning. Royal Oak has a devoted following online for its consistent quality and reasonable pricing.

The briquets burn between 900°F and 1000°F for the first 40 minutes of cooking, and in our tests the temperature dropped only slightly for the remainder of the cook. Royal Oak burned for a total of 80 minutes—30 minutes longer than Kingsford Original. The only briquets that lasted longer were those made with coconut husks from Coshell (now discontinued). In the end the Royal Oak briquets produced 3¼ cups of ash, overall just above the average amount of ash among all the charcoal we tested.

The Royal Oak briquets have added nitrate and/or nitrite, which according to a Royal Oak representative act as oxidizers, allowing the charcoal to light faster and burn a bit hotter initially. Incidentally, these compounds are the same ones the food industry uses to cure meat. Some commenters on forums have mentioned that these oxidizers can make controlling the charcoal temperature during the early phases of cooking difficult. If you’re concerned about it, Royal Oak also makes all natural briquets, which contain only charcoal and vegetable starch as a binder, but we haven’t tested them.

In 2014, Royal Oak added a ridged edge to its briquets, which it claims helps the briquets light faster and burn longer. The design creates a voluminous briquet that’s significantly larger. This means that individual Royal Oak briquets will ash over a bit faster, fill a chimney with fewer total briquets, and, depending on how you moderate the airflow in your grill, burn a bit longer.

During flavor testing, our burger testers couldn’t taste any negative additional flavors from burgers cooked over Royal Oak Ridge Briquets.

In enthusiast circles, supporters of Royal Oak and Kingsford engage in an ongoing debate over which brand is the best charcoal, and Royal Oak has a vocal following. Royal Oak also produces Chef Select, a food-services package that is indistinguishable from the standard consumer packages of Royal Oak.

You may have an easier time picking up a bag of Royal Oak charcoal in person than ordering it online, where stock and prices can fluctuate. We’ve found it’s widely available to pick up at stores like Lowe’s. If you do buy in person, note that the bag may not look like the one pictured in this guide. We’ve seen a few different variations of the packaging, including seasonal designs like a red, white, and blue bag for the Fourth of July. Just make sure you’re getting the briquets, since Royal Oak also makes lump charcoal.

The best-performing, best-reviewed lump wood charcoal we looked at is Fogo All Natural Premium Hardwood Charcoal. It costs about $1.59 a pound, which is about average for lump wood charcoal, and it comes recommended by The Naked Whiz. In our tests, the Fogo charcoal held a very high temperature, maxing out our thermometer in the beginning at 1,148°F and reaching a low of only 800°F. It burned purely, lasting for 95 minutes while producing only ¾ cup of ash. The smoke’s pleasant, robust smell is not unlike that of a cigar.

Though the Fogo charcoal outperforms briquets on most statistics, we believe briquets are easier to use overall. We have more to say about briquets in comparison with lump wood, but the bottom line is this: Briquets burn hot enough and last long enough for most people, and their uniform shape makes cooking predictable. Lump wood’s lack of uniformity makes judging long cooking times and predicting temperatures difficult, and overall lump wood is harder to handle for most weekend grilling.

On the other hand, grilling is as much a kind of showmanship as it is a science, and Fogo, like all lump wood, looks great in a grill, even as you have to work harder to overcome its inconsistent shape. In our tests, we found this to be particularly true of the Fogo charcoal: Because it’s sourced from trimmed tree branches, it contained some of the largest chunks of charcoal among all our lump charcoal samples. Sometimes, a single Fogo lump took up nearly half the chimney space before lighting.

You need to keep a few things in mind when using and storing charcoal. First, ensure that your charcoal stays dry by storing it in a cool, dry place. For a detailed look at charcoal storage and the myth surrounding wet-charcoal storage and spontaneous combustion, read The Naked Whiz’s ultra-informative article.

When it comes to lighting charcoal, we recommend using a simple chimney lighter. The worst thing, in our opinion, would be to use lighter fluid or (shudder) self-lighting charcoal except in the most desperate Jack London–esque situations. If you are for some reason compelled to cook food over self-lighting charcoal, at least do yourself a favor and wait until the briquets are completely white before you begin cooking. Though this waiting period will not guarantee that all the additives present have burned off, it may at least allow for the removal of some of the volatile organic compounds that charcoal lighter can introduce. For more on the most practical ways to build and light a charcoal fire for both long and short cooks, you can rely on the expertise of Craig “Meathead” Goldwyn, who outlines most of the best practical methods in this article.

Today, briquets and lump wood are the two most common types of charcoal available in the US. But it’s not that simple—you can now find self-lighting briquets, original briquets, and all-natural briquets along with bags of various types of lump woods, which are either mixed or advertised as a single variety of wood such as mesquite. This bewildering array of options has ignited a white-hot ideological debate at the heart of American grilling. Choosing between lump wood and briquets can send even the most sensible barbecue fanatic into a diatribe.

Lump wood charcoal is just that: It’s lumps of wood turned into charcoal. You can actually make lump wood charcoal in your backyard if you’re so inclined. To many people, lump wood’s simplicity is its primary advantage: It contains no vegetable oil or starch binder, nothing you can’t see—just good hardwood char, which carries a lot of flavor and produces minimal ash. But the problem with lump wood (if you see it as a problem) is that it isn’t uniform. Because no two pieces of lump wood have the same shape, no two pieces of lump wood ever burn the same. From bag to bag—handful to handful, even—your temperature and cooking time can vary wildly.

Briquets bring industrial uniformity to charcoal. They're a nearly hundred-year-old invention from the mind of Henry Ford, who saw a way to profit from the scrap timber and sawdust that his Model-T production lines were throwing away. A mixture of wood or paper mash goes through dry heating and mixing (in the case of Kingsford, with anthracite coal and lime). After binding with corn starch, the mixture gets pressure-molded into uniform briquet shapes. Briquets offer you a certain amount of consistency while you cook, and as you get comfortable with your grill and chimney, you can start to gauge how many briquets equals how many minutes of cooking depending on how you set up your grill. Briquets are also somewhat denser than the average lump wood alternative, so a pound of charcoal briquets can take much less space in your grill than a pound of lump wood.

Which form of charcoal is “better,” depends on who you ask. Doug Hanthorn of The Naked Whiz champions lump wood because it’s “100 percent pure”, and his site’s forums host some serious lump wood fanatics.

On the other side we have John Dawson, competitive barbecue champ and maintainer of Patio Daddio BBQ, who’s a staunch briquet advocate. He was raised on the stuff with his father, who told him not to waste time with anything else.“For me the bottom line is that it doesn’t do me any good to produce the best barbecue in the world if I can’t reproduce the results time in and time out,” Dawson said. “So it’s all about eliminating variables. Number one out of the gate is to get the fuel nailed.”

We think briquets that attempt to limit the number of additives are better for most people—they bridge the gap between additive-free but irregularly shaped lump wood and consistently formed briquets that are more predictable and easy to control. You get the best of both worlds (at a slight premium).

Stubb’s 100% All-Natural Bar-B-Q Charcoal Briquets were a previous runner-up pick in this guide. Although the briquets burned longer and hotter, and produced less ash, than most of the competition, overall they proved difficult to find after the summer of 2016. Cowboy Charcoal, the distributor of Stubb’s charcoal, sells a new hardwood briquet. But we haven’t yet verified whether it matches our former runner-up pick, so we can’t recommend it at this time.

While Kingsford Original Charcoal briquets are cheap, consistent, and perfectly adequate for most basic grilling needs, they simply didn’t work as well as other charcoals we tested, which burned hotter for a longer period of time. Kingsford Original briquets contain substances such as mineral char, mineral carbon (coal to you and me, though Kingsford processes it in an oxygen-controlled environment, and we really could say it’s “pure carbon”), limestone, borax, sodium nitrate, and sawdust. All of those substances add up to a lot of ash toward the end of your cook and weaken the overall performance of these briquets in competition against simpler briquet formulas. In our tests, Kingsford charcoal cooled off and burned out faster than the better charcoals we found. Kingsford is one the cheapest charcoals around, however, and you can find it for sale everywhere. And with its uniquely identifiable flavor and smell, it’s been a key component of plenty of barbecuing-championship victories around the country every year.

Kingsford Professional Briquets (previously called Competition Briquets) are Kingsford’s entry in the “all-natural” briquet category. They contain only wood char, starch binders, and very small amounts of borax that serve to release the briquets from the briquet mold during manufacturing. This charcoal burned a bit hotter initially than the Kingsford Original formula, but not as hot or as long as our pick.

Rancher 100% All-Natural Hardwood Briquette Charcoal is available year-round in several locations in Georgia and South Carolina. The lack of general availability means we couldn’t recommend this charcoal as our overall top pick or even our runner-up. But as Wirecutter editor Harry Sawyers pointed out, “If you go see the Gamecocks lose in Athens this month, then you can bet you'll smell some Rancher near Sanford Stadium.”

Royal Oak 100% All Natural Hardwood Lump Wood Charcoal is a lot like other lump woods we tested, and we didn’t find anything particularly wrong with it. It burned well, had a nice variety of lump wood sizes, and gave off a moderate amount of ash (not the worst offender out of all the lump wood brands we tested but not the best either). Although Royal Oak’s lump wood is more widely available than Fogo’s, the (slightly) cheaper, hotter, and longer-burning Fogo lump wood merely outclassed it.

We also dismissed extruded charcoals like those sold by Komodo Kamado. Usually made from the shells or husks of fruits like coconut or rambutan fruit, extruded charcoal is big in Southeast Asia. This kind of charcoal is perfect if you’re cooking with a ceramic oven or ceramic grill such as the Komodo Kamado ceramic grill or the Big Green Egg; in fact, it was originally designed for the ceramic ovens that are popular in Southeast Asia. In a ceramic grill, extruded charcoal has a long burn time, even temperature, and low smoke production—but it's terrible in an open grill like a Weber. Due to the extrusion process, which subjects coconut husk char to intense pressure and binds it into a log, these logs burn quickly in an open setting and leave behind a veritable mountain of ash when compared with traditional wood charcoal. This ash production also reduces the charcoal’s overall heat during use in a conventional grill. In short, extruded charcoal is great for ceramic ovens but bad for grills.

We also tested and dismissed a traditional Japanese charcoal (its origin stretches back 1,200 years) called binchotan charcoal and its cousin, sumi charcoal. Made from white oak, binchotan charcoal results from a specially designed process that produces very dense, very pure charcoal. Because binchotan burns at a lower temperature and for long periods of time with very little smoke, it traditionally served to heat indoor yaki grills or tea for the ritualized tea ceremony during the Edo period. It’s fascinating stuff but totally impractical for modern kettle-style grilling, and it’s 10 to 20 times more expensive than standard briquet or lump wood charcoal.

This article was edited by Harry Sawyers.