Maybe this will help....when it’s not real cold....if I have a good fire going going and I shut the stove all the way down my fire goes out. Like from a stove top temp of well into the red on flue thermometer to no flames, no secondaries, nothing. Just a box of smoke. If I crack the door or open the slide a little it explodes and smoke will puff out of the stove.
Now if I leave the slide partly open just a hair, after I get a fire established then, the fire will stay lit and just puff internally in the stove like it’s getting bursts of air. Makes no difference if I have windows or doors open or not.
Let's start with the fire triangle - heat, oxygen, and fuel. In the right mixture, we get fire. If one gets too out of wack, we lose the fire as combustion can't sustain itself.
Just based on this post of yours and your first, that's what it sounds like to me provided that your wood is dry.
Since you said you're closing down the stove and the fire goes out, where does it sound like its going out of wack? Oxygen-fuel mixture. Temperature variance from outside and inside impacts chimney draft, as has been mentioned already. The larger the variance (colder out, warmer in), the stronger the draft will naturally be. Since you have run hot in the dead of winter before, this phenomenon is easily on display for you. That said, your air control has to be operated with this in mind. The same air control position will let in more air when draft is naturally stronger and less air when draft is weaker. You can have a hot-enough stove with some secondary combustion and still get smokey fires out the top if the air-fuel mixture is out of wack. If there's not enough oxygen coming in, there's not enough to mix with the smoke to burn it off before it goes up the flue and/or condenses on your glass. This can cause the fire to die out as in your last post. Or, in your first post, if there's some combustion going on, but it's still a smokey fire, you can have lower flue gas temperatures despite a warm stove.
As for your gallons of creosote, to me it seems to be a combination of burning practices, particularly on the warmer days, and the masonry chimney. Lining the chimney as you've mentioned and thinking about the above could reduce your production of the meat taste-improving compounds (improving might be a matter of opinion).
EDIT: So to add to this, don't be afraid to use a higher air control setting when it's warmer outside. It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to burn wood faster/less efficient, you're just controlling for the weaker draft. By that I mean with weaker draft, there's a higher air control position needed to let in the same amount of air as the lower position had there been stronger draft. Hope that makes sense, but use the fire as your guide of where to position the air control, not the air control itself.
