A Few Questions about Milling Grains
 

My Efficiency has been going downhill lately, and I think it's my mill. When I Mill my grains, I don't have that "Flour" look to it anymore. When I first got my mill, I had a GREAT Crush. Nice broken husks with a little bit of Flour rolling around. Now, I just have briken husks and no Flour. I have a Scmidling Model A, which is only adjustable on one side. I just checked my mill, and it appears that the Rollers moved a little bit, but it moved in a direction that would Close the rollers a little bit. Now wouldn't that produce a finer crush? Hence, more of a Flour crush? I moved the rollers back to the factory settings(marked on the knob) and I'll be milling again on Saturday Morning.


About Grains. Do Wheat Grains Mill differently then, say, a 2 row American Grain? Just checking as my last 2 batches have been Heefs. My last was a Dunkel, and my Eff. was WAY down around 64%. I dropped from 80% to 64%. Think the large Wheat Bill has anything to do with that? Think I should be milling Wheat Grains at a tighter Roller Spacing?

A guy I work with who brews a LOT of wheat beers swears by milling his wheat twice to increase efficiency. Claims a 10-15 pt increase.

Since you're not depending on the husks to ask as a filter bed anyways, the idea seems to be to pretty much pulverize your wheat.

I used to have efficiency issues on beers with a large percentage of wheat or rye. Now I crush them once by themselves, then again with the rest of the grain. I also do a protein rest around 122 and extend my sacc. rest to about 75 minutes. Now my efficiency on those beers is about the same as my others, around 76%.

Use feeler guages and set it to .039 inch (measure at both ends of the roller). This is the factory setting for most 2 roller crushers. Wheat grains are smaller and .035 inch works great for them. If you want to compromise then set at .037 for all grains. The size of the grains changes the crush.

That's what I feel is the cause with Wheat as well. It is indeed quite smaller. With the Schmidling you can make it narrower on one end to get a range of sizes across the length of the mill, as mentioned on his website. Just tweak it in a tad below the factory scratch (that annoys me). What sparge method do you use?

:off: Why is sparge not in the speller dictionary?

In the past I was always batch sparging but recently started to do a modified fly sparge where I keep the sparge water above the grains at all times while the mash tun drains. I start by mixing in 185 sparge water to bring the mash up to 170 F and stir then recirculate to run clear and then slow the drain to 1 QT a minute to drain 14 gallons (preboil volume) over an hour and use 170 F sparge water for the remainder of the sparge. This works very well to rinse the grains. It just pushes all that sugar right out the drain. I am over 80% every time. I always brew 12 gallon batches.

Bohemian Pilsen malt must be huge then. I had to adjust mine to 0.43" before it would even grab the kernels.

Sometimes my posts don't make sense, sorry bout that. I was quoting you, but asking the OP which method hehe. :D At any rate, what I was getting at was the rate of sparge greatly impacts efficiency when fly sparging.

On average you'll see variations from crop to crop. Some malts I have used are indeed really plump.

My rollers are sharply knurled and I never have a problem with pulling the grain into them. I bought the "Crank and Stein" which is very well made.