What's up with my Coals? Grilling Question.

Factual Questions
1

I am feeling somewhat self conscious about this at the moment, slightly unamerican, truth be told, I had a very weird occurrence happen this weekend while grilling. I have just moved into a new house in Colorado, it’s at about 8100 ft above sea level, I also recently had a natural gas line installed in the back deck for the grill that I was hoping would arrive this weekend, it didn’t. So I used my old camp Weber and charcoal. This is what happened.

I put the MatchLight briquettes in there, piled then roughly in 2 layers and arranged them loosely. Lit them and kept the cover off the coals. They lit up and began to whiten - as they always do!

Ten minutes later they were sufficiently white so I put the hot dogs on…Then realized they were not emitting any heat…at all! Almost like they had gone out…so I added another layer and doused it with lighter fluid - light - repeat!

They got hot enough - barely - to cook the dogs but they were not emitting a lot of heat…

So here is the weird part. I went indoors to eat, have a beer etc. and when the sun went down fully [25 minutes later] I noticed the coal were blazing!! Like they should have in the first place. The wind had kicked up slightly in this time as well, I don’t know if that was a factor…

So what gives?

I repeated the above two more times over the weekend and both times the same thing happened, even when I put a lot of coals on there.

In my experience, you light the coals, wait 10-15 minutes, put whatever you want on the grill and voila! Why didn’t these light for almost half an hour or more?

Am I doing something wrong? Was it the small camp grill?

2

Old briquettes?
Sometimes they’ll pick up moisture from the air, and not burn right until the water is cooked out of them.

3

FWIW, I find it usually takes at least 20 minutes for coals to get truly hot. Peak heat happens well after that.

YMMV, especially with MatchLight briquettes, which I’ve never used.

4

As an aside, why are you using lighter fluid and MatchLight briquettes? Unless you like the taste of lighter fluid, just get a chimney starter and use plain briquettes.

5

I’ve always made a pyramid shaped pile before starting and it sounds like you made an even layer. I think the mound shape is supposed to help with starting. I also agree with Xema that 20 minutes is a more realistic time frame for the coals to be ready.

6

Oh my! I completely forgot about the chimney starter…DAMN! I’ve got to go rummage around the boxes in the garage… Thanks folks!

Oh and the matchlight ones are really bad as a general rule I know, I usually use kingsford, but I wasn’t the one at the store buying them. :wink:

7

Two words:

Lump

Charcoal