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.
I too have a Crankandstein mill and love it. I had a JSP mill that the rollers wore out on (full disclosure, I got it from a homebrew shop that went out of business so it was heavily used). So I bougth the Crankandstein mill and haven’t looked back.
That said, if you are using the mill of your choice for homebrewing it should last you a lifetime.
Timely post for me. I bought a crankandstein adjustable 2-roller mill back in 2010, and it worked splendidly until very recently. I’m not sure if it is the malt (Admiral Feldblume is made from a uniquely-grown barley cultivar) or the mill. But it is not catching the malt, I am not getting a good crush, and I brewed to beers side by side and got wildly different efficiencies.
I’m not sure if I need to replace my mill or if I should take it apart and clean it (something I’ve never done). It is a 14 year-old mill that has been well-used for a long time, so I’m considering cleaning it without taking it apart (flashbacks to when I repaired my fresh pasta maker that never worked right again) and maybe just keeping it as a backup.
Even if I do buy a new mill, I’m not sure what I want. I know I want it to work and to be able to run off a corded electric drill. Any thoughts?
I would get a 2 roller mill with gears that always keep both rollers moving.
Do you have any recommendations? The only 2-roller mill I can find that is geared is this one https://www.crankandstein.net/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=11 and I don’t like that the sides are exposed. On the plus side, I could probably reuse my existing hopper and base.
If you read through the thread, I mentioned that I own a manufacturing shop and I made my own. Pictures of it are above, but you do have to right click and open in a new window to see them. If you want to know what I would build, it would be exactly that but I would add the gears to the side even though they are clearly not necessary. Unfortunately, I didn’t want shafts sticking out all over the place so I didn’t make my shafts long enough to add the gears after the fact. Such is life.
Commercially made units all have much smaller rollers so they don’t grab the grain anywhere near as nice as mine does. But I would figure the gear driven units have no issue with that. I don’t own any of them but if I didn’t have a mill that I made, that is what I would buy.
I was thinking something more like this but with only two rollers. I’m not sure but maybe their two roller version doesn’t have the gears. Seems like the stupidest thing ever. But I guess that’s nothing new, I haven’t been able to figure these manufacturers out for years.
https://www.morebeer.com/products/mighty-mill-3-roller-grain.html
As it happens, I work near MoreBeer’s original showroom in Concord, California; I went and took a look at the 2-roller Mighty Mill and confirmed that it was not geared. So I ordered the Crankandstein 2DG. I will have to build some sides for it (thinking of using aluminum tape and plastic from a takeout container or similar), but it is geared and much cheaper than a geared 3-roller and it can run off a normal-sized corded drill. Crankandstein does make a fully-geared 3-roller and sells a “pro” version that is basically what you describe wanting https://www.crankandstein.net/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=5&products_id=28 for a not-horrible $350, but even that uses only 2” thick rollers, so you probably would want something tougher.
Anyway, I figure I can reuse my hopper and maybe the base, and 14 years of good service seems like a decent amount that I shouldn’t gripe about the old one dying.
I figured I would give an update since I believe I bought one of very few 2-roller geared mills on the market (Crankandstein 2DG) and I just had the chance to test it, giving it a good “cleaning” by milling some very old malt destined for the compost. It does mill with my decent-quality DeWalt corded 3/8 inch drill, which is a requirement of mine. However, I will note that it is extremely loud (and annoying-sounding) compared to a non-geared 2-roller. I have a garage and a backyard, so that isn’t a dealbreaker for me, but it is worth knowing about. Also, it takes a lot more torque to get this to grind compared to the old non-geared 2-roller mill. As a bonus, it fit perfectly in the hopper and base that I got with my old Crankandstein 2DT 14 years ago, which made my life a bit easier. I still wish the housing covered the sides of the mill, and I would prefer if it was somehow less noisy, but it works as promised. I’m planning to brew two beers (and mill 32 lbs of malt) this weekend, so I will get the opportunity to see how it performs with lots of conditioned malt soon enough.
Is it the gears that are making all the noise? That kind of makes sense. If I was to do gears on mine I would make them out of Delrin so as to be essentially silent. And of course I have it at work so I don’t need to go buying it. Making steel gears wouldn’t be my first choice, in spite of the fact that I have numerous gear Cutters and a four-axis Machining center.
One thing I would caution you on when you make the statement about the horsepower requirements as well as simply the terminology there. And I don’t mean to be pedantic here, but the idea is absolutely not to grind the malt. The idea is to crush the malt. There is a very big difference. You’re not trying to make flour, that’s what a Corona Mill does. The Malt we use is plenty frangible already, and it produces more dust than we want even when we crush it properly. The problem is, most mills do not crush, they grind. Doing exactly what you said, except the one you just bought does not. It does a proper Crush and I think you’re going to see a very big difference in your lautering. Because of the size of my rollers in my Mill it is very close to producing an ideal Crush. But I have videoed the thing with tape on the shafts and I can say that there is a small amount of slippage on the second roller which indicates there is some grinding taking place. I know the amount isn’t much, but it’s non-zero. I think non-zero is what big commercial breweries are aiming for because that gives the best performance both in the mash efficiency and lautering ( meaning no stuck sparge).
From what I understand, smooth rollers are the ideal situation but they’ve got to be 6 in diameter or greater. Otherwise the malt will not pass through because there’s no traction on those things. I think if I was ever to make a mill with rollers that size I would still put the very fine knurling that I have on mine, on to them because it just doesn’t make any sense not to. 5 minutes and you’ve solved a lifetime’s worth of headaches. I can’t believe nobody else uses that straight knurl.
My statement about the torque requirement had more to do with people who might expect to use a battery powered drill or hand crank — my battery-powered drill couldn’t handle it and I don’t think Most brewers could handle milling more than. A pound of grain with a hand crank using this thing. It feels much much harder than turning my identical (besides the gears and wear) mill.
Grinding doesn’t require a lot of power. Crushing, takes a lot of power. But one method produces a maximum of dust while the other produces a minimum. Not zero, but way, way less. Extract efficiency is not significantly reduced either. But the sparge goes way easier and faster. You’ll see this weekend. I wouldn’t be surprised if your new mill pays for itself in increased efficiency. You can actually crush more, while not getting a stuck sparge, and efficiency will increase. But does so without tearing up husks and causing other flavor issues.
@counterpressure do you have links to pictures of your roller mill that you built?
Other than the ones I already posted in the thread? No.
The pictures in Reply 8 don’t show up for me.
Right click and open in a new tab. I don’t pay for a security certificate for my hosting so I or anyone else who posts a photo hosted on such a server will get the placeholders like that but not the images because of course they’re trying to keep you safe from all the horrors of a JPEG image
This worked, thank you.
I gave this some thought yesterday as I was researching making gears for my mill. (actually, will be a whole new mill, but, gears all the same). I thought I had a gear cutter here that would work, but as it turns out it will not. It’s actually for much smaller gears than I want. Correct gear pitch, just not the correct cutter for that gear size and tooth count. It got me to thinking about your statement about how loud that thing is. It’s possible they cut those gears with the wrong cutter. Or maybe didn’t even use a gear cutter, Idk. Bottom line though, I have made gears with the incorrect cutter before and experienced what you describe. In my case, I was using a plastic gear in tandem with a steel gear, so that the plastic gear was mis-cut didn’t really matter since it would eventually wear to fit, so to speak. It was the second replacement of it in 25 years, so I wasn’t worried about it failing due to the wrong cutter (and not buying the right one just to make it sound nicer).
There’s some math involved in determining the correct gear cutter. It’s not rocket science, but it is important. Any gear (involute gears) will require one of 8 cutters depending on what size, shape and tooth count they have. The cutters are numbered 1-8, with 1 for the smallest gear of that pitch and 8 being the largest, or for making a straight gear rack. Using the wrong one for the diameter will result it a gear that makes a lot of noise, at least for a while. In steel, likely it’ll make noise forever.
Yesterday I bought a set of 16 diametral pitch gear cutters so I’d have the correct one to make a 46 tooth gear, which is what I need to make my 2.880" pitch diameter gears. (my rollers are just under 3" dia so I need the pitch diameter of the gears to roughly match that in order to have them work with those rollers. )
I found these gears on ebay, but they are 1 tooth too few for my roller diameter. Story of my life.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/35336955 3481