New technology and the ancient craft of charcoal burning are not two phrases which often occur in the same sentence.

However, Wellow man James Spratt is combining the two in his new business.

The 31-year-old has set up Black Fox Woodland Products which produces charcoal using a special burner, an Exeter Retort.

The £18,000 steel burner, weighs one and a half tons, and is the only one of its kind in Hampshire. The design won the makers the Devon “Low Carbon Innovative Business” award in 2012.

Traditionally charcoal was made by burning wood slowly beneath a mound of earth or in a ring kiln - a circle of metal buried in the ground.

The retort is a cylindrical steel oven in which the wood is placed. A fire is lit in a box below and when the temperatures reaches 375C within the cylinder, gasses given off by the wood are diverted down into the firebox where they are ignited. The burn is then fuelled by its own gas.

The process takes between four and eight hours to produce between 120 and 180kg of charcoal.

Using the traditional earth mound method this would take more than two days and the ring kiln 24 hours.

Apart from speed the retort allows James to burn unseasoned wood – normally charcoal would be made from wood which had been left to dry for about a year.

James, an electrician by trade, uses coppiced hazel from an 80-acre wood on the northern boundary of the New Forest which he manages. He plans to cut an acre of wood per year.

He told the Advertiser: “I’ve aways been an outdoor person and hopefully I’ll be able to spend half my time doing this and the other half working as an electrician.

He is helped in his new venture by his father, Dave.

Most of Black Fox’s charcoal is sold to London restaurants but in the summer he hopes to produce bagged charcoal for the domestic barbecue market.

There is very little waste from the retort but what little dust is left at the bottom of the cylinder after the burn is added to compost to make biochar fertiliser, which James also sells.