Making hardwood lump charcoal

I got a Big Green Egg off of Craig's List recently. It's a kind of ceramic oven/grill that uses lump hardwood A smallish bag of the stuff costs $7 and fills the egg four or five times. Not terribly expensive, but not cheap, either. (You can probably use briquettes in the BGE, but hardwood lump is much better: It burns very hot and very clean with no smoky flavor imparted. My friend Bill makes cookies on the BGE--no smoky taste! If I want smoke, I can add chips or chunks of hardwood.) 


So yesterday I tried my hand at making some natural, hardwood lump charcoal. I used windfall and old bits of lumber leftover from projects to feed the the fire that heated the inner kiln, a thirty-gallon drum propped up inside the fifty-gallon barrel you see above.  I filled the inside drum with lumps of well-aged, mill ends of Live Oak and Black Cherry that I bought from a local saw mill that gets all of its lumber from domestic tree jobs. So, while making charcoal is never a green endeavor, this was pretty good. All waste wood. 


A total success. It took about four hours to dry the wood completely, then another hour of firing it until the off-gassing started. That was pretty impressive--flames shot out hole I drilled in the bottom of the drum like the afterburners on a rocket. This morning I opened the kiln and found perfect lump charcoal. I used maybe two dollars worth of hardwood in the drum, and got probably $25 worth of lump charcoal. I'll need to do this several times before I pay off the $60 I spend for the barrel and the drum...