Wood ID please

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WoodBurnerInWI

Feeling the Heat
Feb 2, 2020
281
Madison, WI
Got done splitting all my bur oak today, and finished the day by cutting up a small pile of misc rounds. Most were ash, a few were boxelder (yuck) and the rest were something I couldn't ID. These rounds had smooth blue? bark with a very red interior. The fresh splits were also very red. I thought cherry right away but was not getting any cherry smell. Rather the best way I can describe the wood smell is that it smelled "spicy", like if you opened a bag of Doritos chips and took a sniff. Here are the pics:

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Are you certain that's not the box elder? They can have red wood inside the smooth bark. I haven't cut much so I do t know about the smell.
 
Are you certain that's not the box elder? They can have red wood inside the smooth bark. I haven't cut much so I do t know about the smell.

I don't think so, the box elder I cut today (and the boxelder I removed from my yard last year) had rough sort of whitish bark with a very white interior with red streaks within the grain of the wood. This smooth skinned wood I cut today had smooth bluish colored bark and the inside was more yellowish on the outer edges and light to dark red in and around the heartwood. The pics I posted don't really show the color of the splits well but the one where you can see the end of the round is what the inside looked like after it was just cut open.

Could it be Beech ? Looks similar

Is there a variety of beech that has reddish heartwood? I thought beech too when I first bucked the log up, but after smelling that spicy smell and studying the bark closer it didn't look like any beech I've cut before.

These trees came from people's yards, I wonder if it is some ornamental cherry tree? Those are fairly popular in the neighborhood.
 
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It looks like beech to me
We call it blue beech because of the bark looking blue
 
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Bark looks like beech. One of the peeled rounds looks like beech. The red could be something that happened to that tree.
 
Well I will go with it being some form of beech, excellent wood regardless of how it looks! Thank you for the replies!