question for weber people - do you use lump charcoal or the briquettes? Perhaps the egg has spoiled me, but I think food tastes off if it is not lump charcoal, but i was not sure how it holds up or burns in a weber.
Lump charcoal burns fine in the weber. But after spending years with just lump charcoal, I'm back to mostly briquettes.
The idea that lump tastes better may be accurate for 1% of super savant tasters, but it's not really a thing to me. The biggest advantage to lump is that it creates so much less ash, and produces more heat per weight. It definitely can get hotter.
The downside is that it is so much more variable...
- Any given bag can be vastly different shapes and sizes, and you could easily end up with a bag of chips and dust
- Within a bag you have all different shapes and sizes and often have to pick through it for what you're looking for
- A pile of lump burning is all irregular, as far as shapes, density of charcoal, airflow as it moves through, the heat and burn can vary dramatically within one cook or from one cook to another.
In contrast, you can set your watch by good briquettes in every way. The entire bag is usable, every bag is exactly the same, every briquette burns the exact same way, and 30 briquettes will burn the exact same way every time. My son's boy scout troop uses kingsford briquettes with their dutch ovens, and has a chart they use for exactly how many briquettes on the dutch oven = exactly what temperature and for how long, they're that reliable.
I think lump is probably a little better in a egg because the air control is so tight that you really can control the temperature pretty much 100% by airflow, and the actual amount of fuel the fire is dealing with is less of a factor.
And the egg tapers down so much at the bottom, getting more heat with less charcoal is a good thing.
The Weber is not that rock solid for air control, so how much fuel it has to burn matters, and it can fluctuate more if it hits a particularly hot spot of lump in the pile. I think most people on Weber use briquettes for a low and slow, just to remove the charcoal as a variable.
Lump is still great for direct grilling, and in a perfect world I would probably use briquettes for smoking and lump for direct, but it's not worth the hassle to me of playing bag roulette with lump, or paying $30 a bag for premium lump. I see a lot of people online that every time they buy a bag of lump charcoal, they dump it out on a tarp, sort it by size into buckets, and discard the chips. That's more than I'm willing to do.
What I really like is the Kingsford Professional. It's like $10 a bag at Costco. It produces a lot less ash then the standard, and burns a bit hotter. Neither quite as much as lump, but it splits the difference, while still being super repeatable. Loaded up in my Slow N Sear or a vortex or charcoal basket, it gets plenty hot enough for high heat grilling.