Controlling temp

[spinsheet]

I was told that you should only use the bottom vents on a kettle grill to control temp and always leave the top vents on the lid open. Is this the case? I have a One Touch Gold Kettle grill. I'm cooking country ribs for about 1.5 hours so I want to keep the temp lower than if I was simply cooking something like chicken thighs that would only take about 30 mins. Any thoughts?

[1buckie]

Ordinarily, you would want the top vent all open so whatever fire source is going will exhaust cleanly.......
Two things I'm sure of.....1) weber's got the amount of exhaust figured out 'cause it works perfectly most of the time......2) I've lived the choked down, ill burning fire enough times to know the difference........
Whatever amount of airflow in, it has to have 'enough' of an escape route to get a continual feed of air thru the cooker............the people that build big guns trailer mounted cookers are all over this thing called "DRAFT"( the draw of air thru the chambers & out the stack, ex: if the stack is too tall for the volume of the chamber, the air/smoke will stall & not flow thru...)................................if the air 'stalls' inside the kettle, you're much more likely to get stale smoke, creosote & possibly a bad taste in the food...............


All that said, if you already have a good, hot clean burning pile of coals / wood, then you can make moves on the top vent as long as you don't overdo it.......I did this last nite cooking a batch of 'turds & some chick br.......the coal bed was way hot & after the chook was done, I pinched down the top vent to lower the heat for finishing the 'turds.....worked fine

How much is too much?
Depends on how much coal you have going & how far above the target temp you might be & for how long things need to keep cooking......
what I do is practice, practice, practice & eat the results in between each........

[One Touch Platinum]

You absolutely can use the top vents to control the temp. As already stated you need to have a clean burning fire.....DO NOT light a whole chimney of charcoal to get 225 degrees for a low and slow indirect cook! If you learn how much fuel to use the Weber will do all the work for you....if you put a whole bag of coal in for every cook no matter what you are making you will get frustrated because no matter what you do your temperatures will be all over the place and you will over cook everything and waste charcoal. For something that requires high heat I have the bottom vents all the way open, but I use a full chimney and get it really hot and the meat is off after a short period of time and then I choke the fire and have lots of coals I can reuse. For almost every other kind of cook I do I have the bottom vents almost all the way closed and get my target temp by the amount of charcoal I use....it takes a couple of times to figure out how much you need but pretty soon you will get it down. If I am cooking something low and slow but my heat gets a little too high I close the top vent to lower the heat. You don't want to mess with the top and bottom vents at the same time since you will not see a result right away but may overdo it since you are trying to control your intake and exhaust at the same time.....do this one at a time and watch the temp.....it may take 5 or 10 minutes to see the temp drop so don't freak out and adjust the vents at the same time....make an adjustment ,wait and make another adjustment and wait until you get you temp. It is easier to get you temperature up than to cool it down so practice will make perfect. If you are doing a lower temp cook I can not stress the usefulness of a water pan......it will help keep the temperatures even since the water can only get up to 212 f and will also keep the cooking chamber moist. A tip, use water in you pan since you know what the boiling point is and beer or whatever will not and any significant flavor when it evaporates.....spray or mop with beer or juice or wine or whatever flavors you want to impart and it will make a REAL difference.

[1buckie]

"make an adjustment ,wait and make another adjustment and wait until you get you temp. It is easier to get you temperature up than to cool it down so practice "
                            ~~~> One T. Platinum


Very well said...........no freaking out, slow, even, metered moves.......


I usually go top vent all open throughout, but there are circumstances where this is different.....
That 1958 booklet that somebody posted pages to awhile back stated clearly that the top vent was to be open during cooking.....but just like anything else, one folks really begin to get the hang of it, fine tuning will occur......

[1911Ron]

As OTP said using water in a pan will control temps and add moisture, here is my setup with the snake method and all vents open(top and bottom) and 4 or 5 briqs on each chain and temps are at 300degs on each kettle ( i did this to see if it would be the same on three kettles)

[HankB]

Another thought...

Weber has made a kettle as bullet proof as possible. However they aim for higher temps that are more appropriate for grilling. It takes more sophisticated techniques (as described above) to achieve lower temps which the kettle is very capable of producing. It will take some practice to hone those skills so don't be disappointed if it doesn't work exactly as desired on your first attempt. (Like Bill said in Kill Bill II "You didn't think it would be that easy, did you?")

As a counterpoint, Weber has designed the Smokey Mountain to easily produce low temperatures and that's what I usually turn to for smoking. OTOH, it can be a challenge to coax high temps out of the WSM.

When I want low temps out of a kettle, I

• Keep the lid vent fully open. (Apparently not required, just my way.)
• Stop down on the bottom vents. On my grills with ash buckets, I've marked 0, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 and 1 positions for the OT lever.)
• Use one charcoal basket indirect
• add charcoal as needed - about every hour

I'm controlling both air and fuel to keep the temperature low.

[One Touch Platinum]

To me the thing that makes the Weber kettle so great is that it does some of the things that you need to do no matter what kind of cooker you are using much better. What I mean is temperature control can be a pain in the ass on a horizontal smoker type unit and fuel efficiency as well. Because there is not many ways for air to get in the kettle it is easy to keep a level temperature without much fuss.....my Char-Griller does not see any action anymore for this one reason alone! I tried using just charcoal and just wood on it and the temp was all over the place and it used up a shitload of fuel. An example. I did a pork butt on it once using strictly logs with charcoal used only to get the fire started. No matter what I did I had trouble keeping an even temp. I have a side firebox and if I used 1 log it was about right but I had to restock about every 45 minutes and it took me 13 hours to smoke the butt and a whole 40 pound bag of wood! Today I did up a pork butt and I used just plain old Kingsford ...mostly left over from a steak cook I did the day before and I got the temp to sit at around 250 degrees the entire way and it took about 8 1/2 hours and I had to tend the fire once . I think that the kettle shape is the best design for indirect cooking because of the way it holds the heat like an oven and is not the wind tunnel that my horizontal unit is. The thing is that all of the techniques that you use on a kettle style grill are really the same things that you need to do with any other type of cooker if you want to be able to do more than one thing with it but a kettle is just more versatile . Sure you can cook with real high heat but for me at least ...low and slow is what my Weber does best.....holds temp all day long and I only really need to go outside to check it so that the family thinks that I am doing the cooking .....I won't tell them the the One Touch is doing all the work.

[petedawg70]

One Touch Platinum,

    What method do you use for your charcoal?  Do you use snake/fuse or minion method and how much charcoal are you using when you do low and slow?


Respectfully,

Charles
(USMC Ret.)

[One Touch Platinum]

I will pile charcoal all along the front and side of the grill. I tried the snake method but I am to lazy to stand there and stack all the briqs. I have a small pot that I use to scoop charcoal out of my plastic garbage can I keep my charcoal in....I use it and just line up the coal until it circles around half the bowl , a few inches wide. I then will light a small amount of charcoal....about 10 briqs, and start it on one end. I usually have the bottom vents nearly all the way closed and I always use a water pan for low and slow to keep the temp constant. I will get a temp of around 225-250 range and it will sit there for between 5 or 6 hours depending on the wind. I will take a picture the next time I do a low and slow and post it here. There is a picture that I posted from a pork butt I did recently and you can kind of see the setup in that photo. As far as the amount I use....I never counted the briqs but I would say about one chimney full banked around the bowl. If I need more fuel I will add some but that is usually at the end of a long cook, maybe the last hour or so.

[spinsheet]

Guys,

I appreciate all of the great advice here. Going to cook a pork butt tomorrow. I'll let you all know how it turns out 

[One Touch Platinum]

Something I noticed....As I am a huge fan of The BBQ Pit Boys and have watched all of their videos, it would seem that they control their temperature strictly by the top vent. I can never tell by the angle of the camera how the bottom vents are set but since they are using a one touch gold I can pretty much guess that they are wide open since on mine I do not need the handle of the vent to be all the way over to be wide open and in their videos it always seems to be in the middle. I have to admit that they or more so their videos were one of the main reasons I wanted a Weber...so when I first got mine I did a test run using the top vent to control the heat. Did not work for me but the results they get prove it must work for them unless they start the video and cook the food some other way between edits and show the final product on the Weber. I doubt that.  I do use the top vent, but more for finer adjustments...the bottom vents let me control the air intake which combined with the amout of charcoal( The most important factor to me) lets me get a clean burning fire that I am not fighting to control. The biggest turning point in grilling for me was trying to do one of their recipes for chuck roast , where they cooked it to 200 degrees and served it like pulled pork. I was still using my Char-Griller horizontal at the time and had crappy results...more that once with this recipe do to the temp control. Oddly enough, the one thing that my Char-griller does better than a Weber kettle is high heat searing. It has adjustments for the charcoal tray height which lets you get the coal right under the meat but for low and slow, even with the firebox my Weber kills it. Back to the BBQ Pit Boys, for the most part they do a lot of their cooks in the 325-350 degree range so the top vent may be the only adjustment needed but since I do a lot of baking at the same temperatures, I DO NOT want smokey goodness in my cheesecake!

[Johnpv]

Maybe they have 1 or 2 of the bottom vents tapped off?  So even though it's open all the way they're still only taking in half or a third of the air.   Just a thought.  I know for me it's the same I can't control the temps with just the top vent.  I work both to maintain and control my temps.

[Chasing_smoke]

All of the advise above is fantastic. My only addition would be to get a thermometer with a probe or an oven thermometer and monitor the grate temp and not the just vent temp. I did many cooks with just monitoring the vent temp and found that my cooks were going way longer than expected. I found on my kettles that the vent temp was 20-30 higher than the grate temp.  So if I was cooking at 225 on the vent, the meat was cooking at 195 and extending my time. Now I  monitor the vent as a ballpark but watch the grate level much closer.


"my kettle is more powerful it will do almost anything."

[Mozfan00]

Old thread but thought I'd give it it's cred...nice job guys

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I337 using Tapatalk

[Davescprktl]

An oven thermometer is a must for kettle owners.  It did not take me long to figure out that the thermometer on the lid is a useless decoration.  It will give you a range or an indication if the temp is dropping.  I too do fine adjustments with the top vent.