Wow! We were so humbled by the incredible show of generosity that we witnessed this past week at Pizza Night. Our final pizza night of the year brought so many of our favorite people out, and we really felt the love. Thanks to all of your support, we raised nearly $4,000, enough to put the deposit down on our mill!

Here's a sketch-up of what it will look like:

Grain goes into the hopper at the top, is fed into the hole in the center of the stones, where it is ground into flour. So cool!

We've gotten a few questions about what the mill can do, and I'd like to take a minute to answer them here. We are purchasing a mill with 26″ diameter stones. The stones are made with Vermont-quarried granite, and can mill 60-80 pounds of grain an hour. We use about 1000 lbs of whole grain flour every week at the bakery, meaning that this mill will be in fairly consistent use.

The miller is able to control how closely the stones are set together, which affects the coarseness of the grain: close-set stones mean fine grain, stones set further apart equal a coarser mill. This means we can make cracked grain as well flour. We currently use cracked rye in all of our naturally leavened bread and cracked oats in many of our multi-grain loaves.

Because heritage whole grains are much easier to come by than heritage flours, we will be able to experiment with other flours, such as millet, buckwheat, oat and more! Thanks for supporting us on our journey, and we hope you'll continue to follow along and share our project with others.