Trying Out my New Malt Mill!

Well, got a malt mill for Christmas - from the Malt Miller. Never used one before, as I've always bought ready-crushed. Nearly ������£100, so it had better be good.......:lol:
So, here goes!
First things first:


Get the old Rayburn going - we're going to need a lot of hot water!
And no, this isn't my shed. It's our dining room (dinner cooking on top to prove it ....... ) Must get on with building a decent house instead of renting - but for some reason I keep brewing beer instead

Anyway, here's the new toy - looking good!


Almost forgot the recipe in my excitement. It's in the development stages, with the working title of LHB (light hoppy bitter). Maybe I'll totally nail the recipe one day. Or maybe just keep fiddling......
So, I'm after 28l in the fermentor, and I've used:
4400g Crisp Clear Choice malt (never tried this before, Maris Otter my norm)
500g Caragold
100g Pale Crystal (EBC 50-70)
100g Light wheat malt
Total malt 5100g & my target is an OG of 1043, which should give an ABV of not much over 4% I reckon (Brewlab East Midland 1 yeast)

Just milled the malt - the mill seems to work beautifully. Except for the squeaky handle. The knurled rollers are on beautifully smooth bearings. The handle just rotates on a steel shaft - it sounds like you're sticking needles into a bag of mice. Shame.

Time for the mash. My mash tun is a small picnic box, totally unmodified. It fits into an outer insulating box of 50mm expanded polystyrene insulation, taped together with duct tape. Very easy & cheap. But, no tap, so obviously only of use for batch-sparging. For some reason, I prefer fly sparging, so I just ladle the mash out into a 12l tub fitted with a tap & 6" bazooka filter (with the whole bottom of the tub covered in perforated alu foil). Here's the mash tun inside its cosy container, with the sparging tub on top:

All in for AG on the cheap :-)

Well done.

With the option from get er brewed to have grains crushed or un crushed, I like where this is going.

I'd like to make a scratter come grain mill also maybe a rock crusher. Just some engineering dilemmas with changing of plates and wheels to overcome.

But I like it!

Next stage the mash.
I use a very large pan (30l??) to boil my wort, and this also serves as a hot liquor tun to get my mashing water up to temperature. This is where the Rayburn comes in. Given enough coal/wood this will actually boil the water. The trick is to get it very hot indeed, and then put it into the HLT on our electric stove. If what comes out of the tap isn't quite up to temperature, then a quick burst in the electric kettle does the job.
Mash details:
Mash liquor 11l. Put into mash tun at 86C. Left for 15mins for temperatures to equilibrate, after which time it's at 78C. The 5100g of grain added, (pretty cold at this time of year), stirred thoroughly, which gives a mash temp of approx 67C. Leave for 60mins, by which time temp = 63-66C. At this point, for no particularly good reason, I sprinkled 500ml of water at 70C onto the top of the mash.


After 90mins mashing, time to sparge. I ladle the mash into the sparging tub, and let it flow very slowly into the boiling pan. Then I sprinkle Rayburn-heated water over the top of the tub. For me, the trick here is to keep the water level very near the top of the tub.

This took about 1.5 hours. I don't do any tests on the outflow, except for one. I taste it.
I also know from experience that my boiling volumeworks at about 20l (thelevel of the rivets on my pan handle is 22l). So, when it gets close, I taste for any residual sweetness, or bitterness.
To be continued - I'm struggling with the photos!

good luck with your mill..

looks similar to mine...

couple of things to check...

i can run mine on a cordless drill and no squeak

is the hopper blue ?

or is it a plastic film?

Niman said:

good luck with your mill..

couple of things to check...

i can run mine on a cordless drill and no squeak

is the hopper blue ? or is it a plastic film?

Click to expand...

Yeh, I was thinking a cordless drill could be a winner here. And yes, the hopper is covered in a blue plastic film. I didn't bother peeling this off, but I guess I will before it gets too tatty.
The mill is apparently from Australia & has an engraved plate saying "Keg King" and "Malt Muncher No 5441"

Hoppyland said:

Yeh, I was thinking a cordless drill could be a winner here. And yes, the hopper is covered in a blue plastic film. I didn't bother peeling this off, but I guess I will before it gets too tatty.
The mill is apparently from Australia & has an engraved plate saying "Keg King" and "Malt Muncher No 5441"

Click to expand...

The handmade touch

Someone was proud of that ;-)

Ol robbo I think lol

On with the brew.....
The temperature in the grain stays at about 80-85C ( I try to keep the water level somewhere near the top of the sparging tub & the outflow is very slow (not as slow as it looks here - the camera flash has stopped it in its tracks!!):



For bittering, there are 15g of Warrior hops in the boiler at this stage (v high alpha - 17,5%)
The other hops will be:
Flavour: 63g EKGoldings (using up the packet!) and 33g Mandarina Bavaria at flameout.
Dry: Haven't decided yet!

For the boil, I added 10g CaSO4 and 2g ea of CaCl2 & MgCl2. My water comes straight off the hillside behind the house & is very soft. There's no chlorine in it (I don't think sheep excrete chlorine..... :) )
I boil for 1 hour on high heat with the pan lid on, and lose about 2l in the boil.



Without the lid, a lot more would escape (the boil is actually very vigorous).



At 45 mins, half a Protafloc tablet went in. After 1 hour I turned off the heat. Once the boil subsided the flavour hops went in. A quick stir, the lid went on & the pan is left to cool overnight.

NEXT DAY (Tuesday Jan 19):
With the boiling pan now cooled to ambient, I ladled the wort into the fermentor (through this very handy large seive - think I got it at Aldi):



I got about 17l of wort. Obviously well short of my intended 28l brew length - but I expected this, so I topped it up to 25l with water that had passed through the Rayburn yesterday. So, hopefully most common nasties had been nicely simmered to extinction :pray: Doing this hasn't let me down yet (shut up you fool......... )

The nitty-gritty of the wort:
The 25l was at a gravity of 1.049 at 22C. The online Brewer's Friend suggests this is 77% efficiency, so I'm very happy with that & pleased with the results of the milling. I'll pitch this at 25l, then later add 2.5l of boiled, cooled water to get my 28l (includes the starter volume). I go for 25l at first to avoid the initial, vigorous fermentation making a bid for freedom out of the fermentor!.
The 28l should be an equivalent OG of 1044, so I'm likely to get a little over 4% ABV - just right for me :)

A 500ml starter was added (Brewlab East Midland 1), very vigorously beaten in to further
aerate the wort. This morning (Wed 20th) it was fermenting, but I reckon it could do better, so I've beaten the head back into the bulk, and tried to incorporate more air. The FV has an aquarium heater set at 20C in it (new Fluval model, with electronic rather than bimetallic strip thermostat).

Looking, and smelling, rather good - fingers crossed!!

I got a similar mill at Xmas, have only done one brew with it (second will be Saturday) but my mash efficiency was much better than when I used pre crushed grain, so I am a 'mill your own' fan.

Wed evening. Third day of the brew.
Here is the FV with the airlock bubbling nicely. The airlock and the heater cable pass through grommets with silicone grease to help them seal. Silicone grease also around the lip of the fermentor. (Yes, I know I don't really need an airtight seal at this stage, but I do like the bubbling )



Looking inside, not surprised! Good old Brewlab EM1 - I find it a very reliable top-fermenter. I might rouse it again tonight, then leave it sealed up for several days, until the bubbling dies down.

TartanSpecial said:

I got a similar mill at Xmas, have only done one brew with it (second will be Saturday) but my mash efficiency was much better than when I used pre crushed grain, so I am a 'mill your own' fan.

Click to expand...

Agreed. I might try setting the rollers a bit closer next time, though. I just left it set up as it had come. Whilst this was perfectly OK, the way the sparging went suggests that I could go quite a bit finer without problems. The other thing I noticed was that I got a lot more volume out of 5.1kg of grain than using ready-crushed. At first, I thought it wasn't going to fit in my sparging tub, but it did settle down!! :smile:

mine is set at credit card thickness...using and old credit card...grips it fairly tightly. (someone else mentioned credit card as a gauge on the forum)

TartanSpecial said:

mine is set at credit card thickness...using and old credit card...grips it fairly tightly. (someone else mentioned credit card as a gauge on the forum)

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Yes, I've heard that. But I wasn't quite sure how it worked. If this sounds bonkers, what I mean is that I have some plastic cards that just have their info printed on them. My bank cards, though, vary in thickness. For instance, I have a RBS one. The top half printed, the bottom embossed with letters & numbers. On my El-Cheapo Aldi digital calipers (must be spot-on then!) the top half is 0.77mm thick, whereas the embossed half mics out at 1.22mm.
The larger measurement seems more plausible for milling, I suspect. The mill itself has a crude guide on the side - it seems to be set a bit above 0.050. I didn't know the Aussies weren't a metric nation, but this must surely be the equivalent of 1.27mm. So, probably compatible with the bottom half of my card!!
I'll definitely try a slightly narrower gap between the rollers next time, though. No sign whatsoever of a clogging, stuck mash :)

that looks super, I would like to have a crack at making a grain mill, any pics of how the rollers adjust please, it would be nice to buy in grain to store rather than small crushed batches, atb wayne

mereside said:

I would like to have a crack at making a grain mill, any pics of how the rollers adjust please

Click to expand...

I'll have a crack at taking some photos & post them on this thread