Kingsford Charcoal Problems?


 
I think you’ve nailed the root cause of your fire problem - moisture absorption, and not necessarily the charcoal you used.

I haven’t purchased KBB in a long time, and I recently have been considering going back to it for longer cooks. Royal Oak and B&B have been my go to briquettes over the past couple of years. I switched to them because of their “all natural” claims. Both burn very cleanly and hot, but Royal Oak briquettes are tiny and burn very VERY quickly (I believe they’ll give jet fuel and nitromethane a run for the money); and while B&B briquettes are larger and burn more slowly I’ve observed that leftover briquettes crumble down to nothing after exposure to heat - even when they appear unburned.

For the past two years I’ve purchased my charcoal exclusively at Academy and Walmart - B&B briquettes and lump at Academy and Royal Oak at Walmart. But I miss the consistent long burn of KBB and am going to try a couple bags for my longer mid-range and low n slows.

I loaded up on some Kingsford competition from a junk/salvage store down in Carrollton a few months ago, as they had it for a great price. Burns great, very hot, but unfortunately very fast. I can’t think of a single use case (for me) that it’s good for, so once I go through the last couple of bags I definitely won’t buy it again.
 
I'm in Australia and I was buying Kingsfords Professional and sometimes original from Costco and I've had a lot of mixed results from them. I was only using them in my kettle as I no longer have a WSM but use a slow n sear basket in the kettle which holds a lot.

Advantages of using Kingsfords over our usual Heat Beads brand is the smaller size for the kettle and they light up a lot quicker than Heat Beads briquettes as HB's are a fair bit larger in size and take longer to light up but will last a heck of a lot longer and hold their heat better than Kingsfords.
I find the Kingsfords do ash up a lot so have to clean up more, but I liked using them for when it came time to add more coals as they'd light quicker and if I'm just going to do some quick grilling, they are hotter quicker than our HB briquettes.

I learnt lately that Kingsfords are no longer in Costco Australia stores which is sad so I've gone back to the HBs, hope they do come back as Kingsfords are good for what I've mentioned and were a good standby for when i needed a quicker lighting fuel, but when I had my WSM, I'd used HBs as they'd give me a much longer cook overall.

Cheers

Davo
 
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