Hexagonal and stick charcoal: niche formats explained

By Mohamad Sinno, Charcoal Expert · 28 August 2026

The explanation of these coals has not changed in eight years: fingers roll, hexagons were cut to stop them rolling, both suit foil. It is repeated almost word for word across the market, and in all that time nobody has attached a millimetre to it.

The short answer

A finger is a long round briquette; a hexagon is the same briquette with flat faces cut into it so it sits still. Both are foil-first formats for markets that never moved to cubes. We make them in five sizes, 20×50, 20×35, 21×50, 22×50, 22×35 mm — diameter first, length second. They load less per container than a cube, which is the part of the decision the rest of the internet leaves out.

What we make, and what we do not

Worth being exact, because this corner of the catalogue collects names. The long round profile the trade calls a stick or finger coal is a shape we produce — the factory's own catalogue name for it is stix. It runs alongside the hexagonal and octagonal cuts in the five shared sizes above. A buyer asking for sticks or fingers is asking for the stix profile, and the way to be certain is still to send a diameter and a length rather than a name. Dimensions outside the five below are custom work rather than catalogue, and the export desk is the place to start that conversation.

The counts for these sizes are quoted on request rather than published. The factory records a nominal packing count for the cube and the lotus and has not recorded one for the extrusions, and a count calculated across from a cube or from a neighbouring diameter would be a guess that reads in the table exactly like a measurement. Ask for the size you intend to buy and it comes back as a number rather than an inference.

The rolling problem, and the cut that answers it

The mechanics are genuinely well established, and they are worth repeating because they are correct. A shapes guide published in March 2018 notes that finger coals "may roll around if the rumble on your pipe is rigorous", and suggests a diffuser as a partial counter while saying plainly that it "may not eliminate the problem". The same guide describes hexagons as coals that are "finger shaped as well but are cut into their namesake to ultimately remedy the rolling issue fingers have". A brand product listing from February 2020 gives the identical rationale from the other side of the counter: the hexagon shape exists "to avoid rolling".

Two independent sources, two years apart, one mechanism, and neither states a diameter, a length or a mass. That is the gap this page fills rather than a disagreement it settles. Our own catalogue makes the point concrete: the stix, the hexagonal and the octagonal run on one shared size list, so a coal of a given nominal size is that size whichever face it was cut with. The faces are a cut, not a different product line, and choosing the anti-roll profile does not cost you a dimension. What it changes is whether the coal stays where the smoker put it.

One thing follows from the size list itself: length and diameter move independently here. The five sizes above pair three diameters with two lengths, and 20 mm across appears at both 50 mm and 35 mm long. Two coals of equal diameter are not interchangeable if they were cut to different lengths, which is why these formats are specified as a pair of numbers and cubes are specified as one. It is also why a piece count quoted without both numbers tells you nothing — and why we quote these counts against a stated size rather than publishing a table of them.

What they cost per container

Long formats load lighter, and the reason is a property of the box rather than of the coal. A 20 ft container of this product cubes out before it weighs out — it fills by volume, and the weight cap is never reached. So how tightly a shape packs decides the payload directly: the same 10 kg master carton goes in either way, but a 20 ft takes 1,850 cartons of hexagonal, stix, octagonal or flat against 2,000 of 25 or 26 mm cube.

A 40 ft behaves the opposite way — it weighs out before it cubes out, so it carries the same tonnage for every shape we make and the packing difference disappears entirely. That is worth knowing before you assume the penalty scales: it does not, and a buyer moving enough volume to justify the larger box stops paying it. The tonnages themselves, shape by shape, are set out on payload by shape, and the per-kilogram counts behind the carton arithmetic are on pieces per kilogram. All eight shapes are compared side by side in shisha charcoal shapes and sizes.

Markets where these formats sell

These are foil markets. Both sources describe the long formats as suited to foil sessions rather than to heat-management devices, and that is the cleanest way to read demand: where cubes and devices arrived together and displaced the older habit, fingers and hexagons became a legacy line; where foil stayed the norm, they never left. A distributor selling into a device-led market is usually better served by cubes or by flats, and one selling into a foil market may find these formats are what the shelf already expects.

Whatever the format, the shell is the same shell. Our intake rule is a mature coconut shell taken from the tree, preferably arriving as a byproduct of copra production — no young coconut, no flesh in the load. That is the first of nine documented quality checkpoints and it applies to every shape on this site; how it is verified downstream is on quality.