It arrived, and I was excited to put it to use, grinding up some grains for my first homebrew. Word on the street was Charlie Papazian still uses a mill just like this one for his grind, and I happen to like the idea of keeping things small, simple, and hand-powered for a while. I like the physicality of the hobby. It connects me to the process in a way that makes me feel like I'm part of a tradition that goes back to Sumeria and before. (I say this, of course, after only milling a single batch for a 2 gallon brew, naturally.)
Still, I was excited!
I pulled everything out of the box. I put it together. I took it apart again. Puzzled, I searched the internet for access to information about this device that came with no instructions, whatsoever.
So...
Hello, grain. Here you are looking at the grain bill for my first, all-grain brew. This recipe combines two pounds of Rahr Red Wheat with two pounds of Rahr 2-Row, 8 ounces of a special Toasted Malt (I'll cover that next time!), and 4.63 ounces, exactly, of Quaker Quick Oats. Let's cover the grinding today, not the toasting, and not the rest of this simple, little recipe.
I set the Grizzly Mill up on a wooden folding table we keep around the kitchen to use as an extra island. I put in my first bits of grain, to test it out. It seemed too fine. I adjusted to loosen it. And, ker-plunk. The screws on the sides that hold the faces together slipped away. Whole kernels were passing through. The third time was the charm.
The Grizzly Mill is easy to use, but slippery. I had to remove the rubber spacers to get the mill grinding plates to hold together, and during my grind, I noticed that the wingnuts that hold everything in place are liable to slip out from the sides, throwing all the plates off and making even more of a mess than usual.
Also, the Grizzly Mill is SUPER MESSY. I tried using a bag over it to catch the flying grains, and all I succeeded at catching was the plastic bag in between the grinding plates. Also, the bag made it harder to see when my wingnuts were about to slip out of the sides. In the end, I just placed my free hand over the top, and held the finickiest of the screws in place, and gave in to the mess.
And, a mess it was...
This was the view, looking down at just one side of the wreckage.
How much grain do you think I lost, there? An ounce? Two ounces?
I almost swept this up onto the digital scale to get a reading of how bad my losses were, but I figured I was only seeing half the losses, what with all the powder that was flying up from the plates, and who knows how far things got flung where I didn't see them?
Things I have learned:
1) Wear a Face Mask or bandit-like bandanna when grinding: My sinuses were acting up the rest of the night and into the morning from inhaling all those powdered malts.
2) The Corona-style mill can produce a perfectly acceptable crush, but the mills will be a little crazy by themselves, and probably benefit from the sort of things homebrewers do to mod their equipment.
3) Do this outside. Let the lost grains return to nature, where I don't have to sweep. It's one less step for us during a long process. I see the driveway or the porch in my future, for grinding.
4) I ground my grains the night before brewday, because I expected to be working out kinks in my process. I'm both glad and sad that I did. The initial, fresh-crushed smell was so much better than the next morning's milled grains, sitting out overnight. But, the time saved was HUGE on brewday. Measuring out, and hand-cranking grains and cleaning up the mess takes some amount of time, and I say do it the night before to mitigate the time and stress on brewday.
5) When using a grain mill, up your measured grains about an ounce or two, to compensate for the losses due to cheap mills flinging everything all over the place.
Speaking of Charlie Papazian, if you are new to Homebrewing, I recommend his excellent book, wherein I learned all about milling and grinding my stuff.