944play said:
Personally, I have little need for a mill. My LHBS has a self-service mill, so I can double-crush wheat, rye, and deeply roasted grains. Like mperceau, I brew with a half a dozen different base malts, so buying by the sack makes little sense for me.
I do too. I have a full sack of 2-row, Pilsner malt, Pale Wheat,and Marris Otter (and split a sack of both Munich and Vienna with a club member). That's 6 base grains, although 5 sacks' worth.
And despite brewing just 5gal batches, it's very worth it to me.
With all these grains costing me between $20-30 for a 55lb sack, it is SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper. I got a bunch of 5gal food grade buckets (from a winemaking friend-of-a-friend), with perfectly moisture-tight and air-tight gamma seal lids (basically, an inexpensive Vittles Vault). With this storage system (an exact copy of how Kal does it), crushed grain can last at least a couple years without any noticeable staling, which is precisely why almost *anybody* can make this work. Also borrowed from Kal, I put unmilled specialty grains I get from my LHBS in large ZipLoc bags (strictly for organization), and have several more buckets filled with these.
Each bucket can store half a sack. So right now I have a dozen such buckets. The lids also give them a great deal of stacking strength, and so they could be stored at least four-high... and almost certainly higher. But I choose to stack them against a wall in my cold room three-high right now. I could go up to 18 buckets with this height without going higher, and since the buckets are exactly 12" at the widest part, it's easy to calculate:
Basically, my grain (up to 9 sacks) takes up a 3' x 3' (6 sq ft) of floorspace right now, which is really nothing, especially since placement is unimportant. And I could really fit everything into half the space - a 3' by 1' footprint - if I wanted to stack them four-high instead.
So really, brewing with a half-dozen base grains doesn't automatically mean it makes no sense. Proper storage allows them to last MORE than long enough, even if you do 5gal batches like I do. And if there's one or two base grains that you wouldn't be able to use a whole sack even within that timeframe, it would make more sense to source it like a specialty grain anyways - and some shops, like my LHBS for instance, even provide a price break for larger amounts such as 5lbs, which creates even more incentive. Heck, I now buy *almost* ALL of my specialty grains like that, using the balance to build up my own inventory. It's fantastic being able to have everything on hand already, but it's by no means a requirement for grain mills to be worth it. And specialty grains last EVEN LONGER - generally, the darker the grain, the longer it will keep.
And in addition to grains keeping for a VERY long time, a good storage solution can also allow it to take up remarkably little space. So the only two issues that could conceivably result from using a bunch of different base grains, are clearly not even legitimate issues for most people, assuming that a) they brew more than just a single 5gal batch every couple months, and b) they don't live in a tiny studio apartment or something where 3 square feet is out of the question - even though you'd need a fair portion of that just to keep the crushed grains until brew day, not to mention the fact that one would have a hell of a time brewing at all - LET ALONE *ALL-GRAIN* - in a home with so little spare space.
