Digiq2 Ramp Up with Boston Butts (Overnight Cook)

RenegadeSmoker

I have a birthday party this weekend in which I will be smoking two 7.5 butts overnight. Since, this would be my first overnight cook, I did a trial run last weekend.

Set digiq at 225 with ramp up feature. Meat to 195. Woke up the next morning and the meat was 160 and temp was 230. This was perfect since I wasn't planning to take off until lunch

Four hours later and egg temp was the same, but meat was only 165. Where did I go wrong? Taste was good, but didn't want sliced butt.

Any suggestions on this weekend? I was thinking of not doing the ramp feature.

DMW

Where did you have your DigiQ pit probe attached, grid or clipped to dome therm?

Eggcelsior

You may have still been in the "stall", meat-wise.

Mattman3969

I know nothing about the Digiq but it sounds like you hit the stall pretty hard. If you are going low n slow I might suggest trying at 250-275* You could have bumped the temp up when you got up and that would also help push through the stall.

RenegadeSmoker

DMZ- Dome therm.

Eggcelsior- Four hours on a stall is a while. At least on my normal ones. If I would have taken them off at noon, that would have been almost 14 hours on the egg.

TheShaytoon

It usually takes me 20+ hours to smoke a Butt that large at that temp.

Here is a graph of a cook...as you can see there is a "Stall" at around 160.  It will sit there for hours and hours.  You just needed more time!  They don't call it low and SLOW for nothin...

DMW

At those dome temps your grid temp could have been 25* lower. Try 250* dome. 225* dome just seems too low for me.

Eggcelsior

I've had stalls that go 30 minutes, 5 hours, and everywhere in between.

Screamindemon

I have found that if I use the ramp feature that I don't get the bark like I like. I tried many time trying to produce bark using ramp. Seeing everyone's pics with there great bark and I wasn't having any luck. Turned off ramp and there was a nice bark at the end. It depends on what you are looking for as to use the ramp or not. As for me ramp stays off.

nolaegghead

The ramp, I believe, is a feature to slow down the cook by dropping the grate temp down to the food set point temp when the meat is within 30F of the set point (I know you know this, just documenting for other eggers).  I've never heard of anyone using it, good to know what the effects are.

Screamindemon

When I got my guru ramp sounded like a good feature. So I started out using it. After different thing to get a nice bark. I finally decided to try turning the ramp feature off. Now I can achieve a good bark. That's why I posted it so others can learn from my troubles with it.

nolaegghead

That's the primary purpose of this forum, we all learn easier lessons.