Al Fakher Coconut Charcoal

[Stro]

Recently the girlfriend has been in charge of ordering hookah supplies and she bought a box of these coals since all we had left were old quicklites. On the back of the box, they say it leavs less than 4% ash, but these coals literally [i]disintegrate[/i] when you burn them and turn into this sandy, gritty ash that gets into the bowl and sours the smoke. They're decent coals once they get the bowl warmed up, but is there a trick to keeping these from filling the bowl with sand-ash?

[Arcane]

ash doesn't affect the flavor of your smoke....it's something else that's causing your problems. AF coco's aren't as hot as CCNs or CHs, yet hotter than pretty much every other coal out there. if your regular coals aren't CCN's or CH's....you're probably not used to the heat output.

the fact that you say they're good to warm up the bowl, and i'm guessing later on in the session something goes wrong, leads me to believe you're starting off with too much heat. remember that when the bowl gets to temp, you're getting heat from it as well as the coals.

[Stro]

I always light two of them and they last through the smoke just fine. Souring the smoke was a poor word choice, what I meant was it tends to clog the bowl up as the smoke goes on, making the pull harder and harder until I have to bust a lung to get a decent draw. I've started getting used to them though, they take a long time to stabilize and get hot enough to produce a lot of smoke though.