The name is
an old job title

For roughly eight hundred years, colliers lived out in British woodland from spring to autumn, stacking coppiced hardwood into earth-covered kilns and burning it slowly, without air, for days at a time. They slept beside the burn because if it broke through and caught properly, a fortnight's work went up in ten minutes.

Everything else Britain built ran on what they made. Iron, glass, gunpowder, and — eventually — dinner.

It is an unglamorous, patient, deeply skilled trade that almost nobody remembers, and it is the reason charcoal exists at all. So we took the name.

Why we started

Live fire cooking is the best thing you can do outdoors, and in Britain the good equipment is sold almost exclusively to two groups: restaurants, at commercial prices, and people with five to nine thousand pounds to spend on a garden appliance.

That leaves out almost everybody who actually wants one — the household that has just built an outdoor kitchen, spent the budget on the pergola and the worktop, and is now looking at a £6,000 oven and a £400 kettle barbecue with nothing sensible in between.

We think there should be something sensible in between. That's the whole business.