Why Brisket Stalls, and What to Do About It

What is actually happening

You put a brisket on at 225°F. The internal temperature climbs steadily for two or three hours, reaches about 150°F, and then simply stops. Not slows — stops. It can sit there for six hours while you lose faith in your thermometer, your smoker and yourself.

Nothing is broken. The meat is sweating.

Meat is roughly two-thirds water. As it warms, that water migrates to the surface and evaporates, and evaporation takes energy — the same reason sweat cools you and a wet towel on a hot day feels cold. At some point the energy leaving as water vapour equals the energy arriving from the fire, and the temperature flattens out.

The plateau ends when the surface finally dries out enough that evaporation slows below the rate the fire supplies heat. Then the climb resumes.

How this was established

This is not folklore, which is unusual for barbecue.

Food scientist Greg Blonder ran controlled experiments and published the results. In his test the stall began after two to three hours, when the internal temperature hit about 150°F, and lasted roughly six hours before the temperature began rising again.

The two explanations that turned out to be wrong

Both are still repeated confidently, which is why they are worth naming.

Rendering fat. The intuition is that melting fat absorbs energy. Blonder tested it directly: a lump of pure beef fat, probe inserted, into a thermostatically controlled smoker. It produced a deep pool of melted fat and no comparable stall. As AmazingRibs puts it, the rendering-fat hypothesis is busted.

Collagen conversion. More plausible, because collagen does convert to gelatin around 160°F — right where the stall appears. But the arithmetic does not support it. Collagen is only about 2% of the meat, and the energy needed to convert that much is far less than the energy the stall consumes.

Two things happening at the same temperature is not one thing causing the other.

What to do about it

Three options, and the right one depends on what you are optimising for.

Wait. The stall ends on its own. If you started early enough this costs nothing but nerve, and you keep the best bark, because the surface has spent those hours drying and setting.

Wrap in foil — the Texas crutch. Foil takes the humidity around the meat to near 100%, and with nowhere for moisture to evaporate to, evaporative cooling stops. You power straight through. The cost is the bark: the moisture that would have left is now sitting against your crust, softening it.

Wrap in butcher paper. The compromise. Paper breathes, so it slows evaporation without eliminating it — less time saved than foil, more bark kept.

The practical version

Start earlier than you think you need to. Finished barbecue holds for hours in a cooler; a brisket still stalled at dinner time cannot be hurried.

And when the temperature flatlines at 155°F, do not raise the smoker temperature. You will drive more moisture to the surface, which is the thing cooling the meat in the first place.