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<\/a><\/figure>\nThis week I take a look at malt mills designed for brewing beer and cover some of the major features you should be looking for in a high quality malt mill. A good malt mill for home brewing will likely last you a lifetime, so choosing the right mill is an important step.<\/p>\n
Malt Mill vs Grain (Flour) Mill<\/h3>\n
The first thing you need to know when choosing a new malt mill is that a malt mill is not the same as a grain (flour) mill. The mills you buy to make flour crush wheat, rye, oats, corn and other grains into a find powder. There are several variants of grain mills including stone mills that use two circular stones, burr mills which use two steel or ceramic plates, and impact mills that crush the grains. <\/p>\n
The problem with using a flour mill to crush your malt is that it leaves a find powder with no intact husks. The husks actually serve as a filter bed for the grains during sparging, so malt crushed to a find flour will often result in a stuck sparge as well as excess grain particles in the boiler. So you really never want to use a traditional flour mill to crush your brewing grains.<\/p>\n
Key Brewing Malt Mill Characteristics<\/h3>\n
The best type of malt mill by far is a dual roller mill, typically with both rollers made of steel. The reason you want a dual roller mill is that crushing grains between the two rollers allows you to finely crush the interior of the barley see while still maintaining larger pieces of the husk intact. These husk pieces help form a natural filter bed when you sparge the grain in a traditional system or remove the grain bag\/grain filter in a BIAB or all-in-one system.<\/p>\n
Here are some of the key characteristics to look for in a good malt mill:<\/p>\n
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- Dual steel rollers to crush the grain. Most of these have a \u2018knurl\u2019 which is a textured finish to aid in pulling the grain through. My mill has a 12 tpi knurl.<\/li>\n
- The gap between the rollers should be fully adjustable. I use a 0.039\u2033 (1 mm) gap on mine though you may need to adjust that slightly depending on your malt and exact mill. Ideally you want the interior of the grain well crushed to a fine powder while retaining large pieces of husk intact.<\/li>\n
- You should have a 7-15 lb capacity hopper for home use so you can put most of a batch of grain into the hopper at once. Obviously commercial mills have larger capacities.<\/li>\n
- The mill should have a solid wood or metal base. For home use typically the mill laid on top of a standard 5 gallon (19 l) bucket so the milled grains fall into the bucket. Its a good idea to mill grains well outside of your normal brewing area as milling can generate a lot of dust and malts have naturally occurring bacteria on them. You don\u2019t want to kick up a big cloud of dust and risk infecting your fermentation or cooling equipment.<\/li>\n
- You should have a long metal arm on the mill, or alternately the ability to connect a household drill to motorize it. Some more sophisticated mills actually come with a motor attached to the mill.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
A well built steel mill will last most homebrewers a lifetime, and they give you the ability to store grains in a whole form and freshly crush them when needed on brew day.<\/p>\n
I hope you enjoyed this week\u2019s article on grain mills. Thanks for joining me on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog<\/a>. If you want to take the guesswork out of brewing, please try my BeerSmith 4 recipe software from BeerSmith.com<\/a>. Be sure to sign up for my newsletter<\/a> or my podcast <\/a>(also on itunes<\/a> and youtube<\/a>) for more great tips on homebrewing.<\/p>\n
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