Six checks you can do at the gate — and the one thing about brick deliveries that changes how you use them.
With cement, you read the bag: the ISI mark, the grade, the week it was made. With TMT steel, you can check the manufacturer's licence number against a government database from your phone.
A clay brick from a local kiln carries none of that. No mark, no batch number, no certificate, nothing to look up.
Which means the checks below aren't a supplement to the paperwork. They are the entire quality system. Ten minutes of your attention is all that stands between a good load and a bad one — so it's worth knowing what you're looking at.
The six checks
1. Look at them
Before touching anything, stand back and look at the stack.
Good bricks are rectangular, with sharp straight edges and flat faces, and uniform in colour — a consistent deep red across the load. Warped, twisted or bowed bricks won't lay flat and will cost you in mortar and plaster.
Colour tells you about burning. Uniform red is right. Pale yellow-ish bricks are under-burnt. Very dark, blackened or glassy bricks are over-burnt.
2. Strike two together
Pick up two bricks and knock them against each other.
A well-burnt brick gives a clear, almost metallic ring. A dull thud means under-burnt, over-burnt, or cracked. This is the fastest check there is and experienced masons do it without thinking — ask yours to do it in front of you a few times until you can hear the difference yourself.
3. Scratch it with your fingernail
Drag a fingernail hard across the face.
A properly burnt brick won't mark. If your nail leaves a visible scratch, or worse leaves powder behind, the brick is soft and under-burnt. That brick will crumble at the edges during laying and absorb water like a sponge afterwards.
4. Drop one
From about waist height — roughly a metre — onto hard ground.
A sound brick survives, or breaks cleanly into two or three pieces. A brick that shatters into fragments or crumbles was never properly fired.
Do this with two or three, not one. One brick can have a hidden flaw.
5. Break one and look inside
This is the most informative check and the one people skip.
Break a brick and examine the broken face. You want a uniform, compact, homogeneous interior — same colour and texture all the way through.
What you don't want:
- Voids or air pockets — poor moulding.
- Visible lumps of unmixed clay or grit — badly prepared clay.
- A dark core with lighter edges — the outside fired, the middle didn't.
- Layers or laminations — the brick will split along them over time.
6. Soak one overnight
Weigh a dry brick. Leave it fully submerged in water for 24 hours. Weigh it again.
The weight gain is the water it absorbed. For a good brick it should be under 20% of its dry weight — that's what IS 1077 permits for the better classes. Above that, the brick is too porous, which means damp, efflorescence and weaker mortar bond.
While it dries, check for efflorescence. Stand the wet brick in a shallow dish of water in a ventilated place and let it evaporate completely. White powdery deposits on the surface are soluble salts. A trace is common. Patches covering much of the face mean trouble ahead — those salts will migrate through your plaster and paint. In areas with brackish groundwater this check earns its time.
The thing nobody tells you: a load is a range, not a grade
Here's what actually happens.
You test five bricks. They pass. You accept twenty thousand.
But bricks are fired in a kiln, and position in the kiln decides how each brick turns out. Bricks close to the fire come out over-burnt — hard, dark, often distorted. Bricks at the edges and top come out under-burnt — pale, soft, porous. Bricks in the sweet spot come out exactly right.
Every load from a traditional kiln contains all three. That isn't fraud. It's how the process works.
So the question isn't "are these bricks good?" It's "what's the mix, and am I paying for the mix I'm getting?"
How to sample properly
- Pull bricks from several places — the middle of the stack, the back, the bottom. Never judge from the front face of a neatly arranged pile, which is where anyone would put their best.
- Take at least ten to fifteen across the load, not five from one spot.
- Sort your sample into well-burnt, under-burnt and over-burnt as you go. The proportions in your sample are roughly the proportions in the load.
Sort, don't reject
A load with some under-burnt and some over-burnt bricks is normal. Rejecting the whole delivery over it is usually the wrong move — and you'll get the same mix from the next kiln.
Sort the load on arrival and send each grade where it belongs:
- Well-burnt, sharp-edged, ringing bricks → external walls, load-bearing walls, anything exposed to weather or carrying load.
- Slightly irregular but hard and sound → internal walls and partitions.
- Over-burnt, distorted, very hard → foundation soling, filling, hardcore under floors. They're strong; they're just the wrong shape for neat walls.
- Soft, pale, powdery under-burnt bricks → these are the ones to actually refuse. They have no good use in a wall.
Agree this with your contractor before the truck arrives, so the sorting happens at unloading rather than after the bricks are already in a wall.
Measure twenty, not one
Size consistency deserves its own check, because it quietly costs money.
Don't measure one brick. Lay twenty of them end to end in a straight line and measure the total. Compare it to twenty times the nominal length. This is close to how the standard itself checks dimensions, and it averages out the variation you can't see brick by brick.
The modular size is 190 × 90 × 90 mm, though traditional bricks in many local kilns run to different dimensions — what matters is that they're consistent with each other, not that they match any particular figure.
Why it matters: inconsistent bricks mean thick, uneven mortar joints and a wall that isn't flat, which then needs a thicker plaster coat to true up. You pay for that variation twice, in cement and in labour.
The short version
Look, ring, scratch, drop, break, soak. Then sample from deep in the stack, sort the load into three grades, and put each grade where it belongs.
Nobody is going to hand you a certificate for a load of bricks. Ten minutes at the gate is the only quality control there is.
Also in this series: Red Bricks vs Fly Ash Bricks · AAC Blocks vs Traditional Bricks · How to Check Cement Quality at Home
JAYTRA Bricks, blocks, cement, TMT, tiles, paint, hardware, electricals. Sagar Road, near Haldiram Pyau, Tilak Nagar, Bikaner. +91 7665544800 · www.jaytra.com
Samples on display at the showroom — come and hear the difference between a well-burnt brick and an under-burnt one before your first load arrives.