Today at the Woodford Academy we attempted to char a barrel the old way with straw. We set iit up pretty much the way I thought we shound do it. We placed the barrel on some old barrel staves and filled it with straw. The first thing we learned was it did not take as much straw as we thought it would. We had to bales to use but only used about a third of the first bale and it was filled with loose packed straw. We used a little Woodford white dog on the the straw that poked out the bottom of the barrel to make sure it would start. I lit a match and placed it in that staw.
Well at first everybody thought it did not catch, but soon smoke was coming up out of the top of the barrel. Now today was quite windy and cold with a stiff breeze of about 15 mph blowing from downstream of the creek. This wind soon had the barrel blowing heavy smoke with it billowing out of the top of the barrel like my pipe tobacco on a night of heavy drinking. The straw burned and the barrel started to char. The problem was the wind fanned the fire in such a way that on side charred heavily while the other side was mearly being toasted. We let it go for about 15 minutes and took a the heads and toasted them with the flame from the top of the barrel. When we noticed that it looked to be getting a rich aligator char on the area we could see through the smoke, we popped one of the heads over the top and kicked the wood out from under it so that the fire would smother itself out. The problem was it continued to smoke so we decided to pour some water in it to put out any remaining flames. When we took the head off and poured the water, we were suprised to find that there was straw still inside and it was burning. We then kicked the barrel over and raked the straw out. Only about 2/3 of the staw had burned! When we examined the final product, about 33% of the inside was heavily charred. About another 25% was lightly to medium charred and the other roughly 40% was only toasted.
What did we learn? Well the next academy we are going to use less straw. We are also hoping for a less windy day and a more even burn. The main thing we did learn is that barrels can be charred with straw and that there are some tecniques to doing it that we will have to re-learn.
It was very dramatic and an impressive sight. I had fun today.