Charcoal lighter fluid

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Started the old trusty Bar-B-Que tonight for some Wishbone marinated chicken. The wife bought Royal Oak all natural lighter fluid. Smells like old wine. Turns out it may be Red Line or Motul seeing as it is an ester and an alcohol based fluid. We will see if it imparts any flavor like normal fluid will,(which I like). If it's ester based maybe I will start easier on those cold mornings.
 
I use a charcoal chimney with a piece or two of newspaper to fire off the "Andrew Lloyd" Weber. I find not using lighter fluid gives a better flavor to what I'm grilling.
 
Charcoal chimney here as well.. I believe it has paid for itself a few times over not buying lighter fluid..

I would not eat anything grilled by charcoal from the time i was a kid until my late 20s.. At a fourth of July cookout whoever was cooking back in the 70s just kept spraying the fluid over the coals and i remember the burger tasting like gasoline or diesel.. my mom made me eat it. it was a horrible experience.
 
Charcoal chimney is the way to go. I used lighter fluid for years until my daughter got me hooked on the chimney.
 
My folks and I are / were cheap . I remember , as a kid , using gasoline as a lighter fluid . Always figured , by the time the charcole turns white , pretty much , most of the gasoline is gone .
 
Deodorized Kerosene? Decades ago my wife came home with a Charcoal chimney and I though how stupid ! Instantly I found out the charcoal chimneys were a great product..
 
Originally Posted by CT8
Deodorized Kerosene? Decades ago my wife came home with a Charcoal chimney and I though how stupid ! Instantly I found out the charcoal chimneys were a great product..

Kerosene doesn't light very easily though. I remember after Die Hard 2 came out there was a group of Bell Labs scientists who tried to recreate the lighting of a jet fuel stream in an empty section of their parking lot. They substituted ordinary hardware store kerosene which they figured was close enough. They couldn't do it. Tried tossing a lit Zippo into the stream and then kept on trying more and more stuff. I think they finally managed to light it with a blowtorch.

Don't smoke but I do have a few Zippo lighters. Their newer fluid is supposedly "synthetic" although that's kind of an overused word these days. Still - I've heard claims that it has less odor than the previous version, it burns cleaner, and for those keeping them in pockets it's not as irritating if it gets on skin.

Apparently Royal Oak bought the rights to what used to be Gulf Lite charcoal starter. I guess that was from back when Gulf Oil actually made it as a byproduct of oil refining. The only big competitor I remember back in the 70s was Wizard from Boyle-Midway, which was more a cleaning products company than anything else.
 
In a pinch, I use odorless mineral spirits if I have it on hand and there's no chimney starter. Usually, I crumple up newspaper and use a chimney starter or pile the newspaper under the charcoal and set it on fire with a blowtorch via the bottom vents.
 
And I found this: https://escogo.com/charcoal-lighter-fluid/smarter-starter-fluid/

SDS says it's based off fatty acid methyl esters and and ethanol. And FAME is good old biodiesel.
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