B&B Charcoal briquets review

I have really been enjoying testing out all of the new grilling products my local Academy Sports have been stocking. Academy has seriously upped heir grilling game in 2021 and I will be shopping there more often.

The latest product from Academy that I wanted to try was B&B Charcoal Briquets. I picked up the orange bad of Competition Oak briquettes which had the claims of burning “Hotter, Longer, Cleaner” and spent some time evaluating the charcoal in my Weber kettle.

B&B markets this charcoal as “All Natural” with no chemicals, additives or fillers.

Let’s see how well it performed!

The first thing I wanted to do was to test out the B&B claims of “Hotter, Longer, Cleaner” as one can only assume that those claims are being made in comparison to the market leader, Kingsford.  

A quick side by side comparison of the briquets showed that they were extremely different. The B&B briquet, pictured on the left, is much larger and rougher than Kingsford’s.

I suspect the difference in appearance reflects the lack of extra binders/forming agents in the B&B product (I believe B&B does use a little starch as a binding aid).

I loaded up two charcoal chimneys with approximately five pounds (2,300 grams) of each brand of charcoal. Each chimney was placed in a foil pan to collect ashes and the exact weights of the charcoal was measured for each brand.

The chimneys were lit with a couple of fire starter bundles and the testing begun!

For the first ten minutes both chimneys were rolling out the smoke. However, after about 15 minutes the chimney burning the B&B charcoal was producing about 5X less smoke than the chimney burning Kingsford.

In this test, B&B (Right) definitely burnt cleaner than Kingsford (Left).

I let the chimneys burn the charcoal for a little more than two hours and then gave them a little shake to knock off the ashes. I took a picture of the remaining charcoal and it looked like there was more B&B left than Kingsford.

There was nothing scientific about my observation but it looked like B&B might have a slightly longer burn time than Kingsford. In the sake of fairness I will call “Burn Time” a tie as I didn’t see an overwhelmingly obvious winner.

I let both chimneys completely burn down and measured the amount of ash residue left behind in the foil pans. You can tell by looking that B&B (Right) had significantly less ash production than Kingsford (Left).

I weighed the ash residue and compared it to the initial weight of the charcoal in each chimney to calculate a percent ash content.

• Kingsford had an ash content of 21.5%.
• B&B had an ash content of 15.5%

By my measurements, on a per pound basis, B&B produced 38% less ash than Kingsford.

Since more of the B&B briquets are fuel instead of filler/binder it makes sense to expect that you could get the B&B to burn either Hotter or Longer than Kingsford.