How to choose a home grain mill

I’ve been asked a few times about my recommendations for grain mills. I’ve owned three different grain mills over the years (1 hand-crank, 2 electric) and in this post I’ll be sharing everything I wish I had known before buying one: features that I think are important in a grain mill, what to look for, and how to understand the difference between different types of mill.

I hope that this article will cover everything you would want to know about choosing a home grain mill: electric mills vs hand-crank mills, stone mills vs impact mills, flywheel vs no flywheel, whether the Kitchenaid grain mill attachment is a better choice than a full grain mill, how to work out how much money you’ll save by milling flour at home, more reasons why a home grain mill is a good idea, how to figure out what size mill (and brand) to get, and whether an oat flaker is worth it.

Electric mills vs hand-crank mills

If you are thinking of going down the hand-crank mill path, my biggest recommendation to you is to test out someone else’s mill first, and to ask lots of questions before you buy one. Electric mills are more expensive than hand-crank mills, but if you buy a hand-crank mill and then don’t use it because it is too hard or takes too much time, then that is wasted money.

The claims of hand-crank mills to mill a certain amount of flour in a certain amount of time may only be true if the mill is being used by someone very strong and fit, or if the grain is a softer kind of grain than what you might be using, or that the flour is coarser than what you would want.

With all that said, I like having a hand-crank mill as well as an electric mill. We use the electric mill when we can, but because bread is so important to us, it’s good to have a backup that will work even if we have no electricity.

For day to day use though, the electric mill wins every time.

How to justify the cost of a grain mill

Will I save money with a home grain mill?

Look up the price of flour where you live, then look up the price of whole grains of your choice bought in 20kg or 50 pound bags from a farmer, co-op, distributor, or bulk food specialist. 

Then figure out how much flour you use in a year.

Where I live, there is a $2 difference per kilo (around $1 per pound) between flour and grain. I mill around 700kg (1543lb) of flour a year, so my grain mill paid for itself in 6 months! Even if you don’t mill as much flour as me, if you buy an electric mill with a 10 year warranty and the price difference between flour and grain where you live is similar to mine, you will have paid for an electric mill even if you only mill 40kg (100lb) of grain in a year.

Nutrition, taste, and resilience: three more reasons why choosing a home grain mill can make sense

Some other things to consider about the cost of a grain mill are that the flour you mill at home is going to be more nutritious and tastier than the flour you buy, and that whole grains will store for far longer than any flour. If being prepared for supply disruptions, natural disasters, and other stuff that happens is important to you, owning a grain mill at home is worth more than just the ongoing savings on flour.

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Tips for working with hand-crank mills

• Only mill one type of grain at a time. If you mix grains up, the difference in size, moisture content, and hardness between the grains will make milling more difficult.
• If you need to bake a lot of bread, it’s good to have other people help do the milling.
• Allow more time for milling than you think you need. It is no fun being in a hurry to bake. Milling by hand will go much more smoothly if you can take breaks when you get tired.
• Some grains are softer than others. Buckwheat is so easy and lovely to mill, oats are easy too. Wheat is easier than spelt and rye. Experiment with different grains and find what is easiest for you.

Hand-crank mills: flywheel vs no flywheel

A flywheel makes hand cranking more efficient, and also makes it easier to rig up a bike or an old treadle sewing machine, or water power to power the mill instead of hand cranking. If you are thinking of going down the hand-crank road, I highly recommend getting a mill with a large flywheel, such as a Country Living or Grainmaker mill.

Cindy Connor in Grow a Sustainable Diet says that her Grainmaker mill produces twice as much flour as her Country Living mill, so if you need a lot of flour and a hand-crank mill, Grainmaker is probably the better choice.

Electric mills: impact milling vs stone milling

Impact mills are very loud, and heat the flour up a lot more than stone mills do, leading to faster oxidisation and more nutrient loss.

A stone mill is pretty simple technology – a motor or a hand-crank moves one stone next to a stone that does not move. Grain falls in between the stones and gets crushed into flour in a way that does not generate much heat. The distance between the stones can be adjusted to get fine flour for cakes, or coarse flour for making beautiful coarse-milled Scandinavian rye breads, porridge oats, and more.

Some mills use this same stone-milling technology, but with steel plates instead of stones. The Grainmaker hand-crank mills are one example of this. I have not personally used a Grainmaker mill, but I imagine it would produce nice cool flour, similar to a stone mill, because the flour is being milled slowly, by hand.

Choosing the best size for an electric mill

Many mills are graded as a ‘100’ or a ‘200’ model, other ones are not. The ‘100’ or ‘200’ refer to how many grams of fine flour you can expect to mill in one minute.

If you go through a lot of flour and have grid electricity or a large off-grid system, you may want to choose a ‘200’ model, or a large-capacity mill such as the Ko<o XL. If you don’t go through much flour, or if you’re on a small-scale off-grid system, choose a smaller electrical mill.

We go through a lot of flour. I ran a farmers market bakery for a couple of years, and I still bake for a few private customers as well as my large bread-loving family. I find that my KoMo Fidibus Medium (which has same motor and specs as the KoMo Classic) is perfect for my needs.

With a 360 watt motor, the KoMo medium or Classic are somewhere in between the ‘100’ and ‘200’ sizes of other mills, and this smaller mill size means we can use it off-grid on overcast days where I wouldn’t use my old Schnitzer 200. The smaller mill size means that we do have to mill longer than if I had a larger mill, but this is not such a big deal.

Larger mills also have larger hoppers to hold the grain before it gets milled, so you won’t need to top it up as often. I don’t find this is such an issue – I just mill grain when I’m near the kitchen doing other stuff anyway.

What about the grain mill attachments for a Kitchenaid or other mixers?

There are grain mill attachments available for Kitchenaid and Kenwood mixers, and maybe other mixers too. I do not recommend these attachments, because they don’t appear to be as robust as a dedicated grain mill, they mill much more slowly, and can only mill 10 cups (~1300g) of flour before they need to be shut down for 45 minutes. Using one of these will also lead to more wear and tear on your mixer motor, and you will have to disassemble and reassemble the attachment every time you want to use the mixer for something different.

A grain mill attachment also ends up more expensive in the long run because they use more electricity: a mixer motor might use 1000 watts per hour to mill 3kg of flour per hour, whereas one of the smallest electric grain mills might use 250 watts per hour to mill 6kg of flour per hour.

What about oat flakers?

Some grain mills have oat flakers built in to them. These oat flakers can be used to roll different grains, not just oats, to make the best porridge.

The KoMo ones are a wooden box, with the grain mill on one side, and the oat flaker (either hand-crank or electric) on the other side, making them a bit bulkier on the counter, but perhaps more resilient in the long-term, because there’s less moving parts. The Schnitzer Vario looks like a normal electric grain mill, but has a switch that can be moved between the two different settings, so it takes up less space.

Sometimes I am tempted to get an oat flaker, to get a slightly nicer texture for porridge, but at the end of the day, I can make nice oats for porridge and flapjacks by milling oats on the medium setting. When I mill oats on the medium setting, the oats turn out somewhat like ‘quick oats’ and make a nice porridge, not quite as nice as rolled oats, but still useable.

Other things to look for in a home grain mill

• How long is the warranty?
• What are the reviews like? Are the reviews from people who use the mill every day? Or people who just keep it around in case of apocalypse?
• How easy is it to disassemble and clean out the stones if needed?
• Does the flour get heated up much during milling?
• How loud is it?
• If you need to mill a lot of flour, how long can it mill continuously for before it needs to cool down?

Grain mill comparison table

Type of mill	Pros	Cons	Milling temperature
Electric stone mill	Simple and reliable	More expensive than hand-crank mills	Cool to warm
Electric impact mill	Cheaper than a stone mill	Noisy, heats flour	Hot – prone to rancidity
Hand-crank mill without flywheel	Works without electricity	Very hard to get fine flour, very slow	Cool to warm
Hand-crank mill with flywheel	Works without electricity, flywheel makes milling by hand more efficient	Slower than electric mills	Cool to warm
Grain mill attachment for Kitchenaid	Cheaper than full-time mill	Limited milling capacity, uses more electricity, more wear and tear on mixer motor	Cool to warm

What I use

Since 2020 I have been using a KoMo Fidibus medium, which is basically the same as the KoMo Classic. I would have bought the Classic if it had been in stock at the time, because it looks nicer, but other than the wood on the outside, these two mills function exactly the same. I am very happy with this mill and recommend it.

My previous electric mill was a Schnitzer Grano 200. I bought this second hand, and it was already a few years old when I got it. It had a few issues (mainly that it would get clogged up and then was really annoying to clean out, and also that it could only be used continuously for 15 minutes), and then finally it got stuck on the medium setting and could not make fine enough flour for all my baking, which is why I got the KoMo.

For my hand-crank mill, I have the Retsel Mini Ark, also called the Survival Ark or the Wondermill Junior. I do not recommend this mill for anyone who wants to bake several loaves a day, but it might be usable if you are very strong and bake less bread than me. If I could start over, I’d get a hand-crank mill with large flywheel, such as the Country Living or the Grainmaker mill.

More resources for fresh milled flour

How to Replace White Flour with Fresh Milled Flour

Fresh Milled Flour Sourdough for Beginners

Light and Fluffy Pancakes from Fresh Milled Flour

Free Fresh Milled Flour Sourdough Discard Cookbook