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UPDATE: We are informed by a reader that this charcoal is available under the label, "Restaurant Catering Charcoal."
This charcoal comes to us from Brazil, manufactured by a company named Plantar, S.A. and imported into the United States by Triunfo Import Food Corp. This is the first charcoal we have tried which is made from Eucalyptus, so we were interested to see if it smelled or burned like Vicks VapoRub. (You know, that horrid stuff you mother would rub on your chest when you had a cold?) Well, the charcoal has no smell and when burned, well, we'll get to that in a minute.
The charcoal is composed of a good mix of sizes with a lot of large and medium sized pieces. The chips and dust made up 11.7% of the bag by weight which is about average. We found no scrap and no funny stuff. We found one small piece of wood which had not been carbonized.
Ok, now to the burning part. It took between 3 and 3.5 sheets of newspaper to start with our chimney starter test. We couldn't make up our minds of 3 sheets did it, but 3.5 sheets seemed to be beyond what we normally call lit. Anyway, this is just a wee bit easier to light than average, not worth worrying about. The smell was....well, there wasn't much smell. The smoke is very, very mild and pleasant. No Vicks smell at all. The volume of ash produced was well below average, which is good.
UPDATE: When we first reviewed this charcoal we did our usual burn test. We didn't post the results because the results were so absurdly high that we couldn't believe them. Well, we finally got around to doing a second burn test and son of a gun if we didn't reproduce the absurdly high results. So, we figure that they must be real. This charcoal burned longer, much longer, than any other charcoal we have tested so far. In fact, it burned an astounding 25% longer than even Kamado Extruded Coconut Charcoal and Wicked Good Charcoal.
So considering the very reasonable price, the good size distribution, mild pleasant smoke, low ash production, and outstanding burn time, we give this charcoal our Highly Recommmended rating.
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Special Note Regarding Plantar, S.A.'s Environmental Record: We don't pretend to be able to evaluate the environmental records of these South American companies that manufacture charcoal that is brought into the US, hence we don't try to incorporate such information into our ratings. However, when we do come across information regarding environmental considerations, we want to pass it on to our readers so you can make your own decisions about whether or not you want to purchase products from various companies.
We did a search on Plantar, S.A. and got several results that criticize the company's practices. We thought that if you search on any charcoal manufacturer, you would get at least a few wacko tree hugger web sites that criticize anything and everything associated with air pollution and deforestation. However, we searched on Cikel Brasil Verde (manufacturers of Wicked Good Charcoal's Competition Blend) and Noram de Mexico (manufacturers of Sierra Madre Charcoal) and found nothing out of the ordinary. Searching on Plantar yielded quite a number of critical websites:
This stuff was easy peasy to find and no super searching skills were required. If you want to net it all down, what these sites claim is that Plantar, S.A. clear cut and burned native rain forest land twice the size of Vancouver and replaced the native forest with a Eucalyptus monoculture. In doing so, they polluted waters, displaced indigenous peoples, destroyed or ran off the local wildlife, violated labor laws, failed to obtain the equivalent of an environmental impact statement as required by law, and a host of other things. They also claim that Plantar, S.A.'s plantations are not sustainable operations. Plantar, S.A., for their part denies everything. Just to try to even things up, here is a link to Plantar, S.A.'s website:
We must also note that Plantar, SA has a forest which is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, so they must be doing something right. Like we say, we aren't in a position to evaluate this information, but it is out there and we think you should know about it so that you can make your own decision about buying Plantar SA products.
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