A charcoal burner is someone whose occupation is to manufacture charcoal. Traditionally this is achieved by carbonising wood in a charcoal pile or kiln. Charcoal burning is one of the oldest human crafts.
A charcoal burner is someone whose occupation is to manufacture charcoal. Traditionally this is achieved by carbonising wood in a charcoal pile or kiln. Charcoal burning is one of the oldest human crafts.
Since the Iron Age, high temperatures have had to be produced for iron smelting, for glassmaking, and for the working of precious metals. Charcoal has been used to do this for centuries and, in order to produce it, entire forests were felled. With the increasing use of stone coal from the 18th century, the charcoal burning industry declined.[ citation needed ]
Even in ancient times, charcoal was manufactured in kilns. Logs were arranged in a conical heap (a charcoal kiln or pile) around posts, a fire shaft was made using brushwood and wood chips and covered with an airtight layer of grass, moss and earth. The pile was ignited inside the firing shaft and, at a temperature of between 300 and 350 °C, the carbonization process began. The process took six to eight days - in large kilns several weeks - during which time the charcoal burner had to control the draught (by piercing small holes and resealing them), being careful neither to allow the pile to go out nor let it go up in flames. By observing the smoke exiting the kiln, the charcoal burner could assess the state of the carbonization process. If the smoke was thick and gray, the wood was still raw; thin, blue smoke indicated good carbonization.[ citation needed ]
In earlier times, charcoal burners led an austere, lonely life. [1] They had to live near the kiln, usually in a charcoal burner's hut (Köhlerhütte or Köte in Germany, Austria and Switzerland). During the Middle Ages, charcoal burners were ostracised.[ citation needed ] Their profession was considered dishonourable and they were frequently accused of evil practices.[ why? ][ citation needed ] Even today there is a certain denigration of this former occupation. In the German language to have a charcoal burner's faith (Köhlerglauben) is to have blind faith in something. That aside, the continuing requirement to keep the kiln at the right temperature in all weathers meant that the job must have been arduous, lonely and, at times, dangerous.[ citation needed ]
Charcoal burning is still carried out commercially in parts of the world. [2] It is rare in Europe, but still practised in Romania, [3] Poland, the UK, [4] Slovenia, [5] and Switzerland. [6] Other places where it is still common are the tropical rain forests of South America [7] and Africa. [8]
Even in the 20th century, charcoal burners in remote areas like the Harz Mountains and the Thuringian Forest, still used a illebille, a large contraption of beechwood boards, used as alarm and signal device. This is commemorated in the name of a mountain ridge in the Harz, called Hillebille. Today the tradition of this old craft is mainly preserved in clubs and societies. These include the European Charcoal Burners' Society (Europäische Köhlerverein) and the Glasofen Charcoal Burners' Society (Köhlerverein Glasofen). in In 2014, charcoal burning and tar distilling were incorporated into the register of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in Germany by the Kultusministerkonferenz . [9]
Saint Alexander of Comana (died c. 251) is known as "the charcoal burner". He is said to have taken up the job of the charcoal burner to avoid worldly acclaim. [10]
A. A. Milne's poem "The Charcoal Burner" appeared in Now We Are Six , a collection of verse. [11] It begins:
The Charcoal Burner has tales to tell.
He lives in the forest,
alone in the forest;
he sits in the forest,
alone in the forest.
And the sun comes slanting between the trees
In Swedish children's author Maria Gripe's Hugo and Josephine trilogy (the middle book of which was made into the film Hugo and Josephine in 1967 [12] ), the character Hugo's father is a charcoal burner. Both father and son are portrayed as independent, unmaterialistic people with forest craft skills. When Hugo is first introduced, his father the charcoal burner is in prison for assault, something Hugo attributes to him trying to live in a town instead of alone in the forest.
Smoking is the process of flavoring, browning, cooking, or preserving food by exposing it to smoke from burning or smoldering material, most often wood. Meat, fish, and lapsang souchong tea are often smoked.
Coke is a grey, hard, and porous coal-based fuel with a high carbon content and few impurities, made by heating coal or oil in the absence of air—a destructive distillation process. It is an important industrial product, used mainly in iron ore smelting, but also as a fuel in stoves and forges when air pollution is a concern.
The Finnish sauna is a substantial part of Finnish and Estonian culture.
Incense is an aromatic biotic material that releases fragrant smoke when burnt. The term is used for either the material or the aroma. Incense is used for aesthetic reasons, religious worship, aromatherapy, meditation, and ceremony. It may also be used as a simple deodorant or insect repellent.
A lime kiln is a kiln used for the calcination of limestone (calcium carbonate) to produce the form of lime called quicklime (calcium oxide). The chemical equation for this reaction is
A barbecue grill or barbeque grill is a device that cooks food by applying heat from below. There are several varieties of grills, with most falling into one of three categories: gas-fueled, charcoal, or electric. There is debate over which method yields superior results.
Firewood is any wooden material that is gathered and used for fuel. Generally, firewood is not heavily processed and is in some sort of recognizable log or branch form, compared to other forms of wood fuel like pellets. Firewood can be seasoned and heat treated (dry) or unseasoned (fresh/wet). It is generally classified as either hardwood or softwood.
A stove or range is a device that generates heat inside or on top of the device, for local heating or cooking. Stoves can be powered with many fuels, such as electricity, natural gas, gasoline, wood, and coal.
Wood fuel is a fuel such as firewood, charcoal, chips, sheets, pellets, and sawdust. The particular form used depends upon factors such as source, quantity, quality and application. In many areas, wood is the most easily available form of fuel, requiring no tools in the case of picking up dead wood, or few tools, although as in any industry, specialized tools, such as skidders and hydraulic wood splitters, have been developed to mechanize production. Sawmill waste and construction industry by-products also include various forms of lumber tailings.
Dry distillation is the heating of solid materials to produce gaseous products. The method may involve pyrolysis or thermolysis, or it may not.
A beehive oven is a type of oven in use since the Middle Ages in Europe. It gets its name from its domed shape, which resembles that of a skep, an old-fashioned type of beehive.
Brown powder or prismatic powder, sometimes referred as "cocoa powder" due to its color, was a propellant used in large artillery and ship's guns from the 1870s to the 1890s. While similar to black powder, it was chemically formulated and formed hydraulically into a specific grain shape to provide slower burn rates with neutral or progressive burning, as opposed to the faster and regressive burn typical of randomly shaped grains of black powder produced by crushing and screening powder formed into sheets in a press box, as was typical for cannon powder previously.
A wood-burning stove is a heating or cooking appliance capable of burning wood fuel, often called solid fuel, and wood-derived biomass fuel, such as sawdust bricks. Generally the appliance consists of a solid metal closed firebox, often lined by fire brick, and one or more air controls. The first wood-burning stove was patented in Strasbourg in 1557. This was two centuries before the Industrial Revolution, so iron was still prohibitively expensive. The first wood-burning stoves were high-end consumer items and only gradually became used widely.
Slash-and-char is an alternative to slash-and-burn that has a lesser effect on the environment. It is the practice of charring the biomass resulting from the slashing, instead of burning it. Due to incomplete combustion (pyrolysis) the resulting residue matter charcoal can be utilized as biochar to improve the soil fertility.
Charcoal is a lightweight black carbon residue produced by strongly heating wood in minimal oxygen to remove all water and volatile constituents. In the traditional version of this pyrolysis process, called charcoal burning, often by forming a charcoal kiln, the heat is supplied by burning part of the starting material itself, with a limited supply of oxygen. The material can also be heated in a closed retort. Modern charcoal briquettes used for outdoor cooking may contain many other additives, e.g. coal.
The Stöberhai is a mountain the Harz highlands in Central Germany, immediately south of the Oder Dam and northwest of Wieda. At a height of 720 m above sea level (NN) it is the highest mountain in the South Harz. The origin of the name is uncertain, but it is suggested, that a charcoal burner called Stöber may have had his charcoal store (Hai) here.
Mining in the Upper Harz region of central Germany was a major industry for several centuries, especially for the production of silver, lead, copper, and, latterly, zinc as well. Great wealth was accumulated from the mining of silver from the 16th to the 19th centuries, as well as from important technical inventions. The centre of the mining industry was the group of seven Upper Harz mining towns of Clausthal, Zellerfeld, Sankt Andreasberg, Wildemann, Grund, Lautenthal und Altenau.
Resin workers were people whose work involved the extraction or working of resin, which was needed as a raw material in the manufacture of pitch, tar and turpentine. Resin work was an occupation that largely died out in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it was sometimes a primary occupation as well as a secondary source of income.
The history of the forest in Central Europe is characterised by thousands of years of exploitation by people. Thus a distinction needs to be made between the botanical natural history of the forest in pre- and proto-historical times—which falls mainly into the fields of natural history and Paleobotany—and the onset of the period of sedentary settlement which began at the latest in the Neolithic era in Central Europe - and thus the use of the forest by people, which is covered by the disciplines of history, archaeology, cultural studies and ecology.
A charcoal pile or charcoal clamp is a carefully arranged pile of wood, covered by turf or other layer, inside which a fire is lit in order to produce charcoal. The pile is tended by a charcoal burner. It is similar to a charcoal kiln, but the latter is usually a permanent structure made of materials such as stone.
