Hi all, pardon the intrusion... I dont actually brew my own beer. I was looking for info on grain mills and came across this forum.
I have need to grind up dry dog food. Would this mill work for this purpose? Or would dry dog food be too much for it? How much does the hopper hold?
Thank you very much for any input and again, sorry to be a pest.
Carole
I don't know if you'll come back Carole, but as to if it will work for your purpose, I'm not sure. How small do you need to grind the dog food up to? These mills are mostly used to grind grain and corn into flour, what we do in brewing is slightly modify the gap in the grinding heads to instead of turning the grain 100% to flour, we aim more to crush the grain, basically just opening the hills a bit so we can convert starch to sugar. Actually we strive for 1/3 flour 1/3 open and 1/3 shredded (sort of)
I keep thinking that if you ran dry dog food it would probably end up more like "flour" than anything else. I actually would think that if you were looking to just break the pieces into smaller bits, a good strong food processor would work better, especially using short bursts.
But if you are looking for bits that look like the pictures of the "crushes" we show like in the one below your post, then maybe it would work. Lord knows these are strong enough to handle the job, these puppies are haeavy cast iron.
it's just a matter of would it break them into the size you need.
As to the size of the hopper, if you look at some of the pics you can see that the size of the hopper can be made almost unlimited. People often invert a 3 or 5 gallon water jug and cut off the bottom and set that inside the original hopper and fill several pounds of grain in it to grind, and like I did, I used a bit of drain pipe. So size is really a matter of what you can rig up.
If you want to give us more detail about what your trying to do to the dogfood, let us know. You're not being a pest at all.
You know...If you can lay your hands on one of these relatively cheap, and if you tried it and it didn't work out, I bet we on here could find someone on this site near enough to you who would be willing to buy it off you. We get folks asking on here all the time if anyone has one for sale. So think about that too.