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The next step in our homebrewing journey is to take the plunge into milling our own grains. We opted for the Malt King from Keg King - a geared 3 roller grain mill that comes with a nice steel mounting board and saves us having to muck around creating our mounting board from timber. We recently went through the assembly so figured we'd document our experience.
There's a couple of reasons to mill your own grain. Firstly, it's more economical to buy grains in larger quantities - which are unmilled. Once grains are milled they're more susceptible to staling and spoilage, so it makes sense to purchase and store unmilled grains in bulk, and mill them just before brewing.
Secondly, it gives us ultimate control over the crush and resulting efficiency. Although we've never really had any complaints or problems with the crush from our local brew shop, who knows, we may be able to get a boost in efficiency by milling our own. Or it could go the other way, guess we'll soon find out!
As you'd expect, everything you need comes neatly packaged in a box, including;
- Grain mill body
- Steel mounting board
- 4 x panels for the hopper
- Screws and nuts for hopper assembly
- Metal roller guard
- Rubber seal/gasket to go on top of the hopper
- Instructions
You'll only need a phillips head screw driver and a pair of long nose pliers to assemble it. The included instructions are pretty decent and take you through step by step on how to put it together.
The mill itself came already mounted to the steel board which was nice and one less thing to have to worry about during assembly.
First order of business is to peel off the blue protective film from both sides of the steel hopper panels. Thankfully this was surprisingly easy. We've heard some horror stories of people having issues getting these blue bits of plastic off, needing to resort to hair dryers and other means to soften the sheets and melt the glue. It's the middle of summer so everything was pretty warm anyway, so perhaps that helped, but each piece came off without too much drama.
Next, we began joining the hopper panels together and inserting and loosely tightening the screws to hold it in place.
The piece on the right side (in picture above) is around the wrong way and needed to be flipped over - you can see how it doesn't line up correctly at the bottom.
A little bit of mucking around but we eventually got the 4 pieces joined together and most of the screws in place and finger tight.
Side on view - note the narrower ends overlap and sit on the outside of the larger side panels (this is stated in the manual as well)
At this point we realised we hadn't installed the guard piece yet. Thankfully we just had to remove the 4 screws at the bottom. The guard itself isn't particularly thick so can be slightly bent or manipulated to get it in place. It probably doesn't really need to be installed anyway, should be common sense to not stick your fingers in a grain mill but it's not going to hurt to have it there, so we put it in.
The next step is to install the hopper onto the mill body. This is as simple as loosening off the 2 screws at the top on each side of the grain mill so the hopper can then slide into place. The screws are then tightened back up again to secure it in place.
You can see the 2 screws mentioned above in the image below (underneath the metal guard on each side)
The gasket is slotted so once you get it going it all slides into place fairly easily. Go around a couple of times to make sure it's all sitting nice and flush
All done and ready for adjusting and milling!
Stay tuned for more articles on this as we go through adjusting, milling and a full hands on review. We'll link these articles below as we publish them.
But so far, so good. The assembly of this mill was very easy and straight forward. Looking forward to getting this thing adjusted and putting some grain through it for our next brew day!
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