Our Charcoal Year 2022

Another record year

2022 was a record year in so many ways, from record high temperatures to a record number of new Prime Ministers and sadly, the loss of our Queen.

The records kept coming for us at Threecopse as well.

After 2020 we thought that the record of 1493 bags in a year up from 580 was going to stand for a while. 2021 had seen us miss that total by around 90 bags so we didn’t have great hopes.

Well, we started off at a run with orders coming in in January – although we had done a small burn in January 2021, we had to fire up one of the Exeter retorts to cover the demand.

As seems to be the way February was quiet but March found us lighting up again, sadly it also saw John and Chris go down with COVID but we still managed 2 burns.

From then on, we were at it constantly. This is where the first record fell: of the 12 months in 2022, we fired in 10 of them.

Our second record was the final total number of bags made and sold of 1509 – a record we hope to beat this year 😉

Another record we are not planning to repeat again is the number of times we had to damp the charcoal down due to spontaneous ignition.

This usually happens because the temperature within the retort is too high when opened.

Obviously, with the air temperature outside the retort at nearly 40°c, getting the internal temperature below 25°c is an interesting task. Sadly on several occasions we failed and had to deal with the resulting fire – thankfully no damage was done, other than a few frayed nerves.