As a BBQ fanatic, I burn a lot of charcoal.

Bags and sacks of it. Of all kinds.

Sometimes hardwood, sometimes glued-together briquets, sometimes I even just use wood.

But what have we here?

Royal BBQ charcoal is a very clever product, and so I asked to test it.

It claims to burn longer, it comes in very handy 10kg boxes, it is made from compressed sawdust from Indonesia and so it re-uses waste from the sawmills down there, it is entirely natural with no nasty chemical glue binding it, burns with high heat, and it is ecologically sound…

… lasts 5 hours!!!

Well, we’ll see about that… let’s test it in real life!

Firstly, packaging is great.

And 10kg is a nice size – much better than the bags we get in supermarkets, which are always half-empty.

A supermarket 4kg bag of Namibian charcoal briquets is actually bigger in size than a Royal BBQ box, which means the Royal must be at least twice as dense… less air, heavier charcoal, less space.

And cost-wise, Royal BBQ comes in cheaper!

Here’s what it looks like:

It’s very tight charcoal, made of fine powder, and compressed into a hexagonal long cylinder with a hole running through the length of it.

I looked up charcoal production, and it seems this is a method of making super-charcoal developed by the Japanese. The machines used to compress the material operate at very high pressures.

In the UAE, Royal BBQ is primarily sold to restaurant grills, and so it is not yet available retail – but if you contact Al Mimas General Trading, Mr Abdulwahhab – he can arrange delivery to your home!

Let’s light it and see how it performs.

17:30

18:30

almost 19:30

almost 20:30

and 2 hours later, with the coal still burning strong, I went to bed!

Yes, 5+ hours and still going strong… and as you saw, that was a single piece, out in the open, elevated on a grill.

Very impressive, Royal BBQ!