Chris, if you're curious, I post a table showing time/temp/vent percentage on (almost) all the recipes I post. You'll find them all here:
Articles and recipes explaining how to cook barbecue on the Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker, plus a variety of reference topics and instructional videos.
www.virtualweberbullet.com
Skip the first four Beginner Recipes, they don't have time/temp/vent tables.
To be clear, you're not supposed to mimic these readings, I include them just to show the variability that I experience and how I adjust vents accordingly. I may be targeting 250, but you'll see in the table I'm fine with it wandering 20 degrees below or 30 degrees above. Sometimes there are almost no adjustments to vents, other times there are more adjustments. It just depends on conditions, meat being cooked, water or not in the pan, and so much more.
Here's the table from
Best Ribs in the Universe where I'm shooting for 250-275*F. You can see that I might have opened the vents a little earlier, but 233 is an OK barbecue temp and temps seemed to be rising, so I didn't make an adjustment.
Main thing is just don't get too freaked out about cooker temp. You can cook great BBQ in the backyard at any of the temps shown in this table, it really doesn't matter how it fluctuates. Let internal meat temp and a tenderness test using a skewer or thermometer probe or a bend test/tear test for ribs be your guide.
Time | Lid Temp | Vent 1 % | Vent 2 % | Vent 3 % |
11:00 AM | – | 0 | 0 | 0 |
11:15 AM | 233 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
11:30 AM | 233 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
11:45 AM | 233 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
12:00 PM | 237 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
12:30 PM | 250 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
1:00 PM | 248 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
1:30 PM | 250 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
2:00 pm | 249 | 50 | 50 | 50 |
2:15 PM | 270 | 50 | 50 | 50 |
2:30 PM | 269 | 50 | 50 | 50 |
3:00 PM | 280 | 25 | 25 | 25 |
3:15 PM | 282 | 25 | 25 | 0 |
3:30 PM | 275 | 25 | 25 | 0 |