Hello All!
Any advise on use, purchase, or construction of a cyclone or dust separator/collector to mitigate grain dust during a crush?
I grind mine outside, even in the winter. I wear a covid mask when adding grain to my mash tun.
Have you tried malt conditioned milling? Moisten the grains with 1/10 the weight in water first.
The mill I have fits snugly over a bucket. A small amount of dust finds its way out but it is very small.
I grind my grain outside on the driveway in front of the house and both brew and transfer my wort into the fermenter on my patio on the back side of the house.
Why do you wear a covid mask? What does that accomplish? I’m not trying to be critical of you; I’m just curious.
Ditto with comments above: my mill fits tightly on a bucket and I mill in the garage. I brew in the house.
I don’t think it’s a huge deal, but you don’t want to inhale a lot of grain dust. I too always wear some sort of face covering when milling.
This is what I do since I mill and brew inside. No dust.
It takes about 5 min to do 15 pounds of grain, I do it while I’m waiting for some other process to complete so it doesn’t add any time to my brew day.
Doesn’t this leave a lot more gunk in the mill, though?
If you use too much water it can leave build up on the rollers. Running dry grain thru the mill cleans it up after a cpl batches.
If you use the recommended amount to just soften the hull it won’t leave the build up. It’s not wet enough to.
Having said that I quit grain conditioning a cpl yrs ago. It fell into the PITA category for me. I have a low PITA tolerance.
My woodworking shop doubles as my brewery. I combined the two hobbies when I built my mill table and included a a 4" dust collection port located behind the bucket used too collect the milled grain. On brew day I connect a 2 stage dust collector to the port and then start the mill. This eliminates dust completely. I also have a whole shop air filter that can recirculated all the air in the room every 2-3 minutes that leave on anytime I’m pouring milled grain into the mash tun or measuring out grain for recipes.
This is complete over-kill but I already had the dust collectors so why not?
Paul
Look up malt conditioning.
Here is what I do. My mill is mounted to a table. There’s a hole cut in the table under the mill for the grain to fall through. I went to the local Big box store and I picked up a vent outlet for a forced air heating system. In other words it’s how you would mount a heating register to the heating duct work. I installed this underneath my grain mill then took a grain bag and tie wrapped it to the bottom of the vent assembly. This works very well and keeps the dust down in my brewery. The milled grain falls down into the bucket with the bag keeping the dust inside.
+1
I do something similar to what Goose has. The bag on mine is cut so that it just touches the bottom of the bucket. Also the bucket is enclosed in an old cabinet, with the cabinet door closed during milling. This is inside the house, and creates practically zero dust, with no water conditioning.
Sadly, I am not as tech-savvy as Goose, so can’t post my picture. :-[
You have to use Tapatalk to post pictures to the forum, Roger. Unless things have changed recently (and I have not verified this), you cannot attach post pictures to your posts with the Homebrew Forum software
Yes it did!
I recognize that motor! I love mine and it mills nice paired with my JSP MaltMill. Cheers!
I have a fancy version of the bucket mill. The mill mounted on a wood disc with a groove routed to fit over a clearance metal trashcan (it had no lid) with removable internal bucket.
Never any dust escaping.