Grain Mill

The grain mill finally arrived! Riley is seen here sniffing it and will give you an idea of the size of the mill. All the metal that you see is basically a vessel (hopper) to hold the unmilled grain while it feeds down onto the rollers. The metal rod sticking out the bottom right of the base area can either be attached to a hand crank to hand-mill the grain or an electric drill at about 500 rpm (guess which we will be doing). The brown particle board is shaped so that the mill can sit on top of a bucket and the milled grain will collect in the bucket below.










This is the view into the grain mill showing the rollers that crush the grain. The space in between is adjustable and the tighter the gap is, the more starches that will be available during the mash and the higher the efficiency will be. However, because the tighter crush will produce more flour from grinding the grain, the chances of having a stuck mash increase. So its a give and take between gap size, efficiency, and lautering ability. Most homebrew stores that have mills in them usually have a wider gap so that when new homebrewers go home and brew for the first time they dont get a stuck mash and are more likely to continue brewing and return to the store to buy more ingredients. Right now our efficiency is about 73% so it will be interesting to see what our efficiency jumps to with the finer crush.







This is a picture of the 50 lb sack of grain that I bought the other day. We will be buying a lot of these in the future and probably 3-4 different types of malt. Our standard American 2-row which we use in American style beers will be used the most. Pilsner malt is used in lagers and some Belgians Ales because of its cripsness and delicate flavor. Marris Otter is used in British style beers (like our First Snow) and in ales in which a "larger" malt presence is wanted; some people use MO in the IPAs, but it is common in porters and stouts as well. I've been looking at our recipes lately and it looks like we use a lot of Crystal 60L, a specialty malt that we use a lot, so we might buy a sack of that to save some money.








This is a picuture of the 5 gallons buckets that we will use to store the grain in instead of the big bag. The buckets are not airtight, but they are close enough and the lids will keep bugs and other things out of the grain. One sack of grain fits into 2 buckets that can be stacked on top of each other and stored easily.