You can't just tighten it up some and make it crush finer?
And I'm just curious, what exactly does the third roller do?
The third roller on my mill mostly causes it jam up at start of every milling session. 8^(
Once I get it unstuck, it works great but I can't say exactly what it does to help out the crush.
Paul
Ok, sorta confirms my suspicion.
I went to Morebeer yesterday after asking that and checked out a video of the geared mill they have. There's 2 options, 2 roller and 3. The guy says at the start, paraphrasing, "we're using my kit I have at home to show this" and he shows the 2 roller mill. There's virtually no mention of the 3 roller other than to say yea, we have a 3 roller mill and it's up to you to decide.... Uhhhh, yea, looks like you already decided the 3rd roller wasn't worth the additional money. Hehehe.
I just tried to reason it out mechanically, and I can't see how the grain gets to use that third roller for anything meaningful. I mean, how does it even get offset to the one side where that roller is? I've never watched closely the grain exiting my mill, but I assume it's headed straight down into the bucket, not interested in turning to one side to go through another gap again.
Now if they had 4 rollers, ok, now we're talking. That I could see doing something. But 3? The marketing says it helps with the husk somehow. I still don't understand what that means when the grain is crushed. As long as it's crushed, does it really matter what the husk does? I figure it's coming apart in the water later regardless, so why do we care?
I bought a bag of Weyermann Vienna last year and the grains were smaller than the other stuff I use. That caused me to really close up my gap because I don't separate grain when I mill, I put the entire grist into a bucket and toss it in, so the smallest stuff determines the setting I need. Precise adjustability is nice for getting dialed in, but meaningless in my world as far as quick changes. It looks like the mill they show on MB is really adjustable quickly, so that looks like a nice feature. And the 2 roller mill is quite affordable. I'd still rather see less knurling, especially on a geared mill like that. Pick one or the other, but not both. It either needs gears or huge knurls. With the gears, that grain IS going through, I don't care about how deep it's knurled. I think the deep grooves actually lends itself to inconsistency. Seriously, some small grain will sneak through if you're not milling close enough. And the more variation there is in the grain sizes, the more the deep grooves add to the potential problem.
All this discussion has me tempted to build a smooth roller mill just to be able to say I did... My plumber buddy got me the scrap Sch 40 pipe years ago, both in large steel and smaller 3-1/2" stainless. The SS is only Sch 20 though so it might need more support in the center of a 6" roller, and I only have enough of it for one 2 roller mill. Sorta pointless when I can think of about 500 bigger fish to fry in my brewing process. Like working on the yeast the way I should before beginning a batch... lol.
Topic: Grain Mills In General (Read 738 times)
