Pitmaster Reveals the ONLY Charcoal Worth Buying (Don’t Waste Your Money)

📗 Get My Complete BBQ Guides Here: https://earljacksonbbq.com/ If your steak keeps coming off the grill gray instead of seared, or your long cook dies out by mid-afternoon, it usually isn't you. It's the bag you carried home. I've spent 34 years tending fires, and in this one I rank six bags you'll find on the shelf right now — two store brands, Kingsford Original, Royal Oak lump, a big premium max lump, and B&B oak lump — worst to best for somebody who can only buy one. I show you the cook that each bag is really for, why the most expensive bag in the row is the best charcoal and still the wrong buy for most weeknights, and the five things I check before I lift any bag off the pallet. While we talk, there's an eight-pound pork butt on my 22-inch kettle. Ten pounds of charcoal went in at six in the morning, one load, nothing added, and it held between 250 and 275 all day. At the end I weigh what's left, about two pounds saved, and do Walter Tolliver's old pencil math: $26 for a 20-pound bag, nine steady hours, a little over a dollar an hour. That butt probed 203 with a quarter-inch pink ring. If you're a backyard cook with one grill, one garage, and no interest in wasting money on the wrong fuel, this is the bag I'd send you after and how to make it last. CHAPTERS: 00:00 – It Isn't You, It's The Bag 01:16 – The Question Pitmasters Ask 02:31 – Six Bags, Five Spots 03:46 – How I Built This Fire 05:02 – Briquettes Versus Lump 06:23 – #5 The Store Brands 07:43 – Cheap Bags On Long Cooks 09:06 – Spotting Water Damaged Bags 10:26 – #4 Kingsford Original 11:44 – About A Pound Per Hour 13:01 – Never In A Kamado 14:20 – #3 Royal Oak Lump 15:48 – Sort The Bag 17:10 – Walter's Pencil Marks 18:34 – Dollars Per Hour Of Fire 19:52 – One Bag Before Ten 21:15 – #2 Premium Max Lump 22:43 – Best Bag, Wrong Cook 24:02 – Where I Was Wrong 25:29 – #1 B&B Oak Lump 26:55 – Why Oak Tastes Right 28:19 – Limits And Substitutes 29:37 – The Hollow Fire Fix 30:57 – Pulling The Pork Butt 32:26 – Being Fair About Briquettes 33:52 – The Ranking Recap 35:21 – Your Pencil Homework #Charcoal #LumpCharcoal #Briquettes #Pitmaster #BBQTips #KettleGrill #Kamado #PorkButt #LowAndSlow #BackyardBBQ