Why Your Charcoal Grill Runs Too Hot

Work through it in this order

Start with the bottom vent, because this is the answer roughly eight times out of ten. Charcoal burns in proportion to the oxygen reaching it. If it is running hot, the vent is more open than it needs to be, or something is holding it open. Close it to a quarter and wait a full fifteen minutes before judging.

Then the fuel load. If you lit a full chimney for a cook that wanted ten lit coals on a bed of unlit, no vent setting will save it. The quantity of lit fuel sets the ceiling; vents only control where you sit under it.

Then wind. Wind forces air through the vents regardless of your setting and can add 10°C (50°F) or more. Move the cooker, turn the bottom vent away from the wind, or build a windbreak.

Then the lid seal. Kettles have no gasket, so if the lid is warped or not seated properly you have an uncontrolled air inlet. Check it sits flush the whole way round. On kamados and drums, check the gasket has not perished.

Then the fire's shape. If your snake ends were touching, or lit coals scattered across the pile when you tipped them in, you have two or three burn fronts instead of one. That will run hot and burn out early, and there is no fixing it mid-cook.

Things that will not fix it

• Closing the top vent. This traps stale smoke and makes the food bitter, and it makes the cooker less responsive rather than cooler. Steer with the bottom vent.
• Spraying water on the coals. Steam, ash clouds, thermal shock, and on a ceramic cooker a real risk of cracking it.
• Opening the lid to let heat out. It briefly drops the air temperature, then floods the coals with oxygen and makes the underlying problem worse.
• Adding more meat as a heat sink. It works marginally and for about ten minutes.

The one that catches everyone

Over-correction. You close a vent, nothing happens within two minutes, so you close it further. Fifteen minutes later both adjustments land at once and the fire is dying, so you open everything up, and twenty minutes after that it is at 175°C (350°F). Charcoal cookers have real thermal lag. Make one small change, then wait fifteen minutes before making another.