Why We Decided to Start Importing Charcoal

First, let’s address the elephant in the room – we’ve built our business selling sustainable British products. In fact, everything in our range, until now, has been grown and produced domestically.

I love British charcoal – nothing’s changed there – and we’ll still offer our range of high carbon, easy to light, clean-burning British charcoal as we expand our range. But when we were asked to source a charcoal product for one of our retail partners, we knew it would be impossible to do with British supply.

They needed us to replace a charcoal from their range that was sourced from the other side of the world, with a product they could endorse with confidence – similar performance, better sustainability credentials. Performance-wise they wanted a dense, long-burning charcoal suitable for use in ceramic BBQs and any type of smoker.

So, for almost two years now, I’ve been working to find a product we can believe in – high quality, of course, but also highly sustainable, with minimal impact on the environment.

We decided quickly that we only wanted to consider options from Europe. This would keep down the transport miles, minimise our risk from corruption and perhaps most importantly, make it easy to visit and build a relationship with a new supplier.

Europe has a few major hubs for charcoal with Poland and Ukraine both producing a huge amount for the European market, albeit with a focus on supermarkets – typically, charcoal exported from Poland and Ukraine supplies the low-cost, high-volume market.

Spain is also one of the biggest producers of charcoal in Europe due to its strong BBQ culture as well as the heavy use of charcoal in restaurants. 80% of Spain’s charcoal production is focused in one distinct area, Extremadura, a largely rural and unspoiled region in the West of Spain. Similarly, Portugal produces a reasonable amount of charcoal, just over the border in Alantejo. It was here, in Spain or Portugal’s woodland pastures, that I hoped I might find something special.

I was originally introduced to holm oak charcoal by Elky Whitaker, also known as The Smokin’ Elk, who uses our charcoal at his BBQ school. Elky always told me how he missed using holm oak, which he’d stopped buying around the same time he started working with us.

This farming system means there’s always a huge excess of holm oak wood available; it’s used heavily across the region for firewood, but charcoal has been made here for more than 2,000 years.

While in the UK we typically harvest young, fast-growing trees, the holm oak trees are typically older and at the end of their productive life, so their timber is naturally very dense – a characteristic that carries over once it’s been turned into charcoal.

It really felt like this super-dense, slow-burning holm oak charcoal might be the perfect partner to our beautifully light, easy-to-use British charcoal… so it was time for me to start trying to find a supplier.

Spanish charcoal production is pretty similar to British in that it’s made up of lots of small, artisanal charcoal makers rather than one or two huge factories. This is perfect for Love Logs in terms of the type of suppliers we love to work with, but made it bloody difficult in terms of the sourcing process – I think I reached out to around a hundred charcoal makers and heard back from less than 20.

Supplier one was a traditional charcoal maker in Extremadura, who have invested well to scale their charcoal making – no longer using the traditional ground kilns, having installed two larger steel kilns, which give them scale, speed of production and much safer working conditions.

Then I moved across the border and visited two suppliers in Portugal. With the first I was taken to the charcoal production site, which was much bigger in capacity than the Spanish site, but less progressive in terms of technology – around 40 ceramic “kilns” were built into piles of earth. The business had more capacity but the equipment and working practices felt a bit rustic, and I didn’t feel 100% sure they had the processes in place to offer us a consistent product.

Finally, I met one of Portugal’s biggest charcoal merchants at their large HQ – where they had a packed warehouse, from locally produced holm oak and cork oak charcoal to imported charcoals from across the world. These guys were serious players, but while I was reassured by their size and professionalism, I wondered whether our project might be a bit small for them. I also questioned whether a firm importing charcoals from all over the world was the right partner for Love Logs.

As I travelled across Spain & Portugal, I stayed in Airbnbs with BBQs, allowing me to take more samples from each site and test products that hadn’t been damaged by a journey to the UK. Whatever we decided about the producer, the charcoal had to stand up to our expectations, so we had to rule out anything of an inferior quality. Sometimes running a small business can be stressful, sometimes it can be ridiculously hard work… but standing outside Airbnbs in the sunshine, cooking Iberico pork over Iberian charcoal… that was no bother at all!

So, I revisited our list of requirements; the charcoal needed to be dense and long-burning, meeting the requirements of demanding customers in the UK; we needed to source a product that was sustainable, with zero concerns over deforestation; we were insistent on working with a professional supplier, who would not only produce a repeatable product but who pay a fair wage, and have good health & safety practices – something often overlooked in charcoal production across the world.

In the end, we chose to work with the Spanish supplier.

They’re a professional, medium-sized business that have invested properly in what they do – big enough to handle the job, but small enough that our business feels like it will matter to them.

The charcoal was the best I tried, from the samples I received in the UK and what I picked up in Spain, and just as importantly, the people behind it just felt right - good people, that I know we can build a long-term relationship with.

Secondly, it’s how it’s made. Holm oak charcoal is produced at a slightly lower temperature than our British charcoal - and much lower than over-processed, factory-made products.

This means it’s not quite as highly carbonised. There’s still a bit of the original wood structure left in there - and that’s where the flavour comes from. It gives a slightly sweet, smoky profile that you just don’t get from higher-carbon charcoal. Try it with something simple like chicken thighs and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

You speak to a British charcoal producer and they’ll tell you lower carbon is a bad thing, I even used to believe it – but the reality is, this just isn’t true.

That said, as with anything there are some trade-offs.

With holm oak, you might notice it’s a bit livelier when you light it. Because it’s dense and slightly less carbonised, small pockets of natural gases can remain trapped inside. As it heats up, these get released, which can cause a bit of sparking or popping – but this usually only happens during lighting before settling down into a long, stable, steady burn.

While it’s traditionally used for open-fire cooking in Spain, it’s a perfect fit for modern BBQs like kamados, gravity-fed smokers and bullet smokers, where airflow is controlled and the lid is quite often down.

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