There’s no reason I need to make charcoal—I don’t normally use it for anything, and if I did, bags of it are so easy to buy. But I find the whole process of exhausting wood sticks into little brittle ...

Charcoal is the wild west. Those black, lumpy chunks people throw into their backyard barbecue grills all look more or less the same. What’s inside the bag often is not. To be sure, most charcoal in ...