Cheap Lump

[gerard]

I work at a huge winery and add oak staves to our tanks instead of putting our wine into barrels. We throw the staves away after we empty the tanks. Would any of you be interested in wine soaked oak staves for cooking? We throw away tons of this stuff every year. They are about the size of a picket in a picket fence. I can get a picture of some if you like.

The wood chips Jack Daniels sells in zip lock bags sell very well at the local Wally World. I don't know that I can tell any difference in anything cooked with them, but damn they smell good. Maybe you can get a piece of that business.

[ThreeDJ16]

I work at a huge winery and add oak staves to our tanks instead of putting our wine into barrels. We throw the staves away after we empty the tanks. Would any of you be interested in wine soaked oak staves for cooking? We throw away tons of this stuff every year. They are about the size of a picket in a picket fence. I can get a picture of some if you like.

Or, you could convert these to charcoal - would be a cheap endless source?

-=Jasen=-

[LeadDog]

Ok here is a picture of the oak soaked in wine.

You can see the holes in the ends of the staves. The bundle of staves comes connected all together with a heavy duty zip tie running through all of the holes. The pile of broken up pieces is one stave. The staves seem to be really easy to break up into smaller pieces. Yes they really smell good too.

Now of course is the wrong time of the year to get staves because we just made the wine and are putting it into tanks with the staves. Later this year we will empty the tanks and ditch the staves. Last year at the end of the season after much of the staves had been hauled off there was still a construction dumpster full plus 20 or so 4x4x2 bins full of the staves. I have no idea the volume of wood we throw away at work but it is a good size amount.

[Farmer John]

Hmmmm - I would try that as a smoking "chunk" but you could certainly make charcoal from it too. You come up with a price to get some to the east coast and I'll try it.

John

[samantha]

Leaddog...I purchased some of the staves or wine barrel chunks as smoking wood and have not used it yet. It would make great lump or smoking chunks. What is the average size of the almond lump?

[LeadDog]

Ok follow up pictures.

Bags of charcoal.

8 lb bags of charcoal. We don't have very many in stock right now and they do fit into a box so that can be shipped UPS.

I thought someone asked about the size of the lump in the bags so here is a picture of our discard pile. This is the size of the lump you find in the bag.

We run the lump across a screen as we are filling the bags so that almost all of the fine charcoal falls through the screen. The small stuff gets put back out into the land.

The website is up. http://hotstuff.servehttp.com/

The thing I hate about the 30 pound bags is if we ship them the bag tears and then you have a mess. We do have a box around here somewhere that they will fit into but the location is unknown right now. I was wonder what people thought about charcoal in a box? It would be a lot easier to ship.

Here is a picture of the charcoal pit empty.

I should get a picture of the stumps that we put in there. My thought on making charcoal from the wood staves is you wouldn't end up with a lot of charcoal from a batch. The wood looks to small to me. My thoughts on the wood staves is I'll let you know when we start pulling it out of tanks again and I'll PM some of you who want to test it.