“I was embarrassed to say I offered firewood,” Javier Sanchez mentioned. He and his father, Joel, personal and function Chief Firewood, in Smithville, an hour southeast of Austin, and provide wooden to eating places and barbecue joints as far-off as Houston and Dallas. Sanchez grew up within the enterprise his father based in 1990, however he noticed it as a final resort when he went looking for a profession of his personal.
He was establishing metallic buildings along with his cousin when an opportunity dialog with a buddy modified his thoughts. The buddy requested why Sanchez was losing his time working for another person when he could possibly be getting ready to take over a longtime household enterprise. “These phrases hit me like a ton of bricks,” Sanchez mentioned, and he requested his father about coming again into the fold. That’s the place he has been since 2013.
In late 2021, Sanchez was delivering a load of a cut up publish oak wooden to Terry Black’s Barbecue in Austin. Co-owner Michael Black was there to obtain it, and he instructed Sanchez concerning the new Texas Monthly Top 50 barbecue listing that had simply been launched. Black named some barbecue joints on the listing, and Sanchez realized he provided an entire lot of them. “He mentioned, ‘It’s worthwhile to model your organization,’ ” Sanchez recalled. On the time, Chief Firewood didn’t also have a web site. All of its new purchasers had been gained by phrase of mouth. That was when Sanchez set to work.
“Both get with the instances, or get left behind,” Sanchez mentioned of his new outlook. He envisioned a YouTube page with movies from his pitmaster prospects, which launched a 12 months later. Sanchez created social media accounts for the enterprise, employed somebody to construct the Chief Firewood website, and designed a metallic badge with the corporate’s brand and web site to go on each rack of wooden saved in a number of the state’s finest pit rooms.
Sanchez had already been making waves within the enterprise. When Joel began the corporate, Chief Firewood was the intermediary. Joel hauled semitrailer a great deal of logs to woodyards that cut up, stacked, and offered the wooden to the general public. Sanchez urged his father to let him search out some restaurant prospects in Austin that will purchase cut up wooden instantly from Chief Firewood. He made chilly calls in his new Chief Firewood work shirts, which had been embroidered with the corporate brand. “Quite a lot of them known as me again, and the phrase of mouth simply took off,” mentioned Sanchez. A type of early prospects was Franklin Barbecue, in Austin, which might quickly change into an amazing reference in courting potential prospects. “We simply fell into the barbecue increase on the excellent time,” Sanchez mentioned.
Again then, Sanchez delivered unfastened logs that wanted to be unloaded and stacked by hand. He satisfied his father to put money into pallet jacks and supply vehicles with liftgates. They welded collectively wheeled metal cages for wooden racks massive sufficient to carry a half wire of wooden every. (A wire equals 128 cubic toes of firewood, or round 600 to eight hundred logs.) Deliveries had been made simpler by simply rolling just a few of these racks into place. The Sanchezes go away the racks behind and choose up the empties with every new supply. Sanchez figures they’ve constructed 550 racks in all, at a price of $800 every.
A lot of the wooden Chief Firewood provides is publish oak, which is by far the most popular smoking wood in Central Texas. Most of Sanchez’s deliveries are made in Austin, to the likes of Franklin Barbecue, Moreno Barbecue, and Terry Black’s Barbecue. Three of the 4 barbecue joints to obtain a Michelin star this week—InterStellar BBQ, La Barbecue, and LeRoy and Lewis Barbecue, all in Austin—are prospects. Sanchez additionally delivers publish oak to the legendary Louie Mueller Barbecue, in Taylor; to 2M Smokehouse, in San Antonio; and to Reality Barbeque, in Houston. Just a few of his prospects favor different hardwoods, comparable to pecan (Distant Family, in Austin) and mesquite (the newly opened Black Gold, additionally in Austin).
I spoke with Sanchez on the Texas Month-to-month BBQ Fest in Lockhart a pair weeks again. Chief Firewood was there as a sponsor, offering wooden to pitmasters who wanted it, and Sanchez stood at a desk in entrance of a number of piles of cut up oak, explaining the seasoning course of to inquisitive passersby. He additionally defined the distinction between dwell timber and publish oaks he has harvested over the past decade which might be often known as standing lifeless timber. Their root methods had been careworn from the extreme drought circumstances that endured between 2011 and 2015 in Central Texas, the place publish oak timber thrive. The timber died from the roots up, however many remained standing with out rotting.
Texas A&M famous the rapid decline of post oak trees in Texas in a 2016 report concerning the results of the drought. The decline was a boon for these promoting firewood, as farmers and ranchers would ask for his or her companies to take away lifeless timber. It additionally made for a extra environmentally pleasant wooden provide. Sanchez mentioned the standing lifeless publish oaks from that drought aren’t as simple to search out as of late in “the motherland of publish oak,” as he describes the roughly forty-mile radius round Smithville the place the corporate harvests timber. “You might simply drive up and down the freeway the place we’re from within the nation, and you’ll see locations with a ton of lifeless timber. Now you don’t see them anymore,” he mentioned.
As a substitute, Chief Firewood now will get the vast majority of its publish oak provide from a giant community of farmers, ranchers, and builders. Sanchez mentioned that when any of them wants land cleared, “they name us, versus paying another person to come back out and reduce the timber down.” Snailbrook, the corporate city Elon Musk is constructing close to Bastrop, just lately wanted seven hundred acres of land cleared for what Sanchez was instructed was an emergency runway and known as Sanchez to take out all of the publish oak.
Whereas the availability should still be there, harvesting inexperienced wooden has its challenges in comparison with taking the as soon as prevalent lifeless timber. “They’re already lifeless, so that they’re additional alongside within the seasoning course of after we reduce them,” Sanchez mentioned, which implies Chief Firewood can promote the wooden in three or 4 months. Submit oak from a dwell tree takes a 12 months to be correctly seasoned after the tree is reduce down. “You’ve got your funding tied up,” Sanchez defined, which additionally means the enterprise wants extra land for storing the wooden it’s seasoning.
As of late, Chief Firewood sells about 4 hundred cords of wooden monthly. A number of the largest publish oak timber present two cords of wooden every, however Sanchez mentioned the common tree yields a few half wire. Meaning Chief Firewood is sawing and splitting roughly 9,600 timber per 12 months. And, for a price, it’ll noticed a tree to any size you’d like, take away the bark, and create thinner items utilizing a triple-split course of that requires further dealing with. “We have now to offer them what they need,” Sanchez mentioned. “We have now to cater to the client.” Simply know that the job will probably be performed cleanly. Sanchez mentioned he finds poorly reduce and cut up wooden to be offensive.
When Sanchez was rising up, his picture of an individual promoting firewood was that of a redneck hauling a heap of mismatched wooden items at the back of a beat-up pickup truck. The time period Sanchez heard used to explain such sellers was “cedar choppers.” He shied away from the firewood enterprise as a result of he didn’t wish to be known as a cedar chopper. Now folks name him Chief. It’s a nickname his father earned within the oil fields that caught with him when it got here time to call the enterprise. Sanchez was as soon as embarrassed to promote firewood, however, he mentioned, “Now I take a way of pleasure in it when folks name me Chief.”