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The BEST Charcoal for Smoking & Grilling in 2024: Lump vs Briquettes

Getting ready to gear up your smoker… But not sure what the best charcoal for smoking is? In this video, we kill two birds with one stone by discussing the best charcoal for smoking AND grilling. We even tested both lump and briquette options from three different brands… So you’re getting the full spectrum on what’s offered. For this review, we tested lump & briquette charcoal from Cowboy, Jealous Devil, and B&B. So let’s get into the details, shall we?

When determining the best charcoal for smoking or grilling… There are a few categories to look into. For our purposes, we tested a few different areas to get a more well-rounded feel of what charcoal is truly best. We tested how long the coals took to get to the white ash stage, cook time, overall burn time, and quality of the ash for cleanup. For the white ash stage, we were determining how long it takes for those coals to get hot and ready to use. The quicker the heat up time, the quicker you’re smoking. Cook time describes how long the coals stayed hot enough to cook with, and total burn time describes how long the coals stayed lit in total. As for ash quality… This gave us an indication of how cleanly the coals burned. Was the ash fine and fluffy? Or was it a bit gritty?

Now that you have a solid idea of how our test was run… It’s time to watch the video, and learn about the best charcoal for smoking and grilling.

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:10 Jealous Devil Lump Charcoal
0:33 Cowboy Lump Charcoal
0:55 B&B Lump Charcoal
1:27 Jealous Devil Briquette Charcoal
1:52 Cowboy Briquette Charcoal
2:16 B&B Briquette Charcoal
2:44 Overall Winner & Final Thoughts

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Video Transcription

0:00
are you using the best charcoal for your grill we took the top lump and brickette charcoal Brands and did burn test on each of them let’s see how they stacked up against each other let’s start with our lump charcoals jealous devil lump charcoal in about 30 minutes we had

0:15
white ash and the total burn time was about 4 hours the cook time on this lump charcoal was about 2 and 1/2 to 3 hours and when it was all done the ash consistency was really fluffy this bag of charcoal ran us around $35

0:30
overall we gave this a score of 8 out of 10 Cowboy lump charcoal with cowboy we had white ash and about 20 minutes and the total burn time was 2 and 1/2 to 3 hours the total cook time was 2 to 2 and 1/2 hours and the ash consistency was

0:45
Fluffy this bag of charcoal was on sale and costed us around $13 overall we gave Cowboy a score of 7 out of 10 B&B lump charcoal we had white ash in about 20 minutes in the total burn time was 4 and

1:00
1/2 hours the overall cook time was 3 and 1/2 to 4 hours and the ash consistency was really fluffy we paid around $15 for this bag of charcoal and we gave B&B lump charcoal a score of 10 out of 10 and for our lump charcoal

1:15
category B&B hands down was the best value and the longest total burn time and cook time now let’s see how the briquette charcoal Brands stand up against each other with a jealous devil we had white ash in around 4 5 minutes

1:30
and the total burn time was 4 1/2 to 5 hours the total cook time was 2 and 1/2 to 3 hours and the ash consistency was fine the cost for jealous double briquette was around $22.76 that came out to A1 14 per pound

1:45
we gave jealous devil briette a score of 9 out of 10 Cowboy briquette charcoal with cowboy briette charcoal we had white ash at around 35 minutes and the total burn time was 3 to 3 and 1/2 hours

2:00
the overall cook time was 2 hours and the ash consistency was grainy we paid around $9 for this bag of charcoal and that comes out to around 64 cents per pound we gave Cowboy briquette a score of 7 out of 10 B&B briquette charcoal

2:15
with B&B briquette we had white ash at around 25 minutes and the total burn time was 4 to 4 and 1/2 hours the overall cook time was 2 and 1/2 to 3 hours and the ash consistent was Fluffy

2:30
this bag of charcoal came out to around $10 per bag and that means 56 per pound of charcoal we gave B&B brickette charcoal a score of 10 out of 10 B&B clearly outperformed the other brands of

2:45
charcoal and was a little bit easier on our pockets our runner up was jealous devil as it was a little bit more expensive it still performed very well and we found Cowboy charcoal to be a decent budget choice for the performance that it delivered drop us a comment of

3:00
what your favorite charcoal brand is

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