ELMORE — As one of the oldest professions, grain-milling has undergone many revolutions over the years.
The latest one is underway in a shed next to the bread bakery that Andrew Heyn and Blair Marvin operate at their home and business, Elmore Mountain Bread, about 30 minutes north of Montpelier.
Heyn, a former chef, is manufacturing granite grain mills by hand and shipping them to buyers all over the world. He made a dozen mills in 2018, and expects to make and deliver about 25 this year.
“A lot of bakers are looking to connect with the way flour used to be made,” Heyn said. “They’re looking for more flavor in their flour instead of being this white ingredient that comes off a truck.”
For nearly as long as humans have consumed wheat, they’ve been rolling the grain between rocks to remove the bran and germ from the inner soft endosperm. Evidence from as far back as 6700 B.C. shows that people were milling wheat somehow, according to Flour.com.
Heyn started milling his own grain more recently, and built his own mill through trial and error in 2015. He used pink granite that was shaped for him by a 120-year-old grain mill maker, Meadows Mills in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Other bakers saw his mill and liked it, he said, so Heyn started making more, using granite and stonemaking tools from Barre.
Heyn’s mills perform exactly the same function that mills always have: grinding the grain between two stones.
Mill-making is nearly a lost art, said Heyn. A century and a half ago, there were 22,000 stone mills in the United States, according to Flour.com. In the 1880s, grain companies started switching over to large roller mills to make white flour, and nowadays the old stone mills are mostly relics, restored by preservationists and used for teaching history. An ardent community of fans has grown up around the old mills.
“The sheer design of the milling plant … there’s often this incredulous feeling that primitive people, colonial folks and so forth, could have possibly designed this,” said Charles Yeske, the director of the Society for the Preservation of Old Mills, or SPOOM, a Pennsylvania group that coordinates dozens of regional nonprofit groups, many of which publish periodicals. SPOOM has 800 members.
Visitors to old mills “are amazed that without computers, and without the tools we have now, there were such craftsmen and thinkers and architects and designers,” said Yeske, who is a historic properties manager and curator for the Bucks County Department of Parks and Recreation. Yeske is overseeing the restoration of a grain mill that was originally built in 1800. It had a water wheel powered by the nearby Tohickon Creek.
“Ours had a sawmill attached to it,” said Yeske. “You could be sawing lumber when you weren’t milling grain.”
Starting from scratch
Nowadays, most of the grain in the U.S. is milled by several agribusiness companies that own large milling operations around the country. Heyn said his company and Meadows Mills are among just a handful of companies producing small granite grain mills now.
That means Heyn had to start his mill-building operation, called New American Stone Mills, from scratch. Stone mills are traditionally built with a fixed bottom stone and a top stone separated by a driveshaft, which spins against the bottom stone, just hundredths of an inch apart. When he started looking for a way to produce this technology, Heyn studied old texts on the topic that have been preserved and published by SPOOM.
“They’re really into knowing the art of the stone,” said Heyn. “That’s how I figured out a lot of stuff.”
The millstone has a pattern, or dress, with furrows. As Heyn researched mills, he learned many millers had patented individual designs.
“I spent a lot of time reading through these old patents and trying to pick apart the nuances of what worked best,” he said. The style he arrived at is called a three-quarter stone dress. In the books Heyn read, the millers’ terminology for the stones is related to women; the center hole is the eye of the stone, and then moving out from the eye, the regions are called the bosom, waist and skirt.
A friend who has a shop called IronArt in Stowe showed him how to weld; another friend who is an engineer at Concept2 in Morrisville helped him figure out some technical design issues. He learned a lot from YouTube. Through another friend, Heyn found a Barre shop — Granite Importers — that would cut the millstones he needed.
He buys stone-cutting tools to create the furrows from Trow and Holden, a stone tool maker in Barre. He has one full-time employee, and has some of the steel and stainless steel work done in Wolcott and Enosburg.
In all, Heyn has made about 60 of the mills. One ended up at a Whole Foods in the Atlanta suburbs, which is being used as decoration; the rest, he said, are being used to turn grain into flour.
Reconstructing a centuries-old process
Heyn’s mills work the way stone mills have worked for centuries. Both the top stone and the bottom have the furrows, and when the top stone spins, those furrows criss-cross each other and work like shears, chopping the grain into smaller bits. The grain is not only sheared, but ground, breaking into smaller and smaller pieces.
The grain needs to be broken down to a fine consistency to create the gluten, which gives the bread its stretchiness and structure; if it is ground too coarsely, the bread will fall apart. If the grain is ground too fine, the flavors and aromas dissipate too quickly.
Sifting is a critical step in the process of turning wheat into bread. With a stone mill, it’s up to the miller whether or not he or she will sift the whole wheat to remove some of the coarser bran particles. Through the stone milling, the nutritious germ has been imbedded in the endosperm and isn’t lost in the sifting process.
At Elmore Mountain Bread, Heyn and Blair usually sift off about 15% of the bran, leaving a flour that is about 85% endosperm, with 15% bran and a little bit of germ. For lighter breads like focaccia and baguettes, 20% of the bran is sifted out.
Local foods and local crops
Most of the wheat farming in Vermont disappeared with the western expansion 200 years ago. It has slowly started to return, on a small scale; Heyn, who buys as much grain as he can locally from five farmers, estimated there are 250 acres of wheat being grown in Vermont now.
Meanwhile, in the 20th century, bread went the way of much of the food in the western world, becoming a commodity produced on a large scale, with manufacturing driven by factors like low price and long shelf life, not flavor. Heyn said milling technology in that period moved away from stone slabs toward steel corrugated rollers, which stripped away more of the bran and germ – and with it, the flavor and the nutrition.
But in the 1960’s, consumers started looking for alternatives to ultra-processed mass-produced foods, and slowly a local, slow foods movement began to take shape. Local vegetables and fruits became available, and eventually meat, cheese and wine.
Grain is a late arrival to the local food movement. Producing local whole grain bread from local wheat is far more complex than growing local vegetables. And the differences are more subtle, said Jeff Hamelman, who was baking education director at King Arthur Flour in Norwich from 1999 to 2017 and teaches baking around the world.
“It’s much easier to eat a local tomato and have a revelation in your mouth compared to that pink one that came out of Mexico,” said Hamelman. “It’s harder to have that same revelation in your mouth if you’re using white flour from grain grown in Kansas versus white flour from grain grown in Vermont.”
But as consumers have become more discriminating, the time for local grain, milled locally, has come, said Heyn. Wheat is a seed that can be stored for years, but as soon as it is cracked and exposed to air, its flavors and aromas start to dissipate, he said.
“So the sooner you can grind it and make it into bread and bake it, the more of those aromas and stuff you can capture. That’s something bakers are looking for,” he said.
Also, among those who care about local food, “people want to know their grain comes from a nearby farm, and they want to know how it’s grown, and that it was grown well,” he said. “They’re also looking for something unique; there are hundreds of varieties of wheat.”
There’s a strong community of bread bakers nationally and internationally, and Heyn attends shows and conferences around the country. A large regional stone mill in Skowhegan, Maine called Maine Grains hosts a conference every year; in September he’s headed to another called the Southeast Grain Gathering in Kentucky.
Piecing together a lost system
Heyn’s mills are custom-made. The one that is headed for Australia has a 40-inch diameter top stone and will mill about 100 pounds of grain per hour. A 48-inch diameter mill bound for Peterson Quality Malt in Charlotte can mill about 200 pounds per hour. The smaller one costs about $18,000; the larger one about $25,000. Shipping to Australia is about $4,000.
Meanwhile, Elmore Mountain Bread is selling 1,000 loaves of bread a week in Montpelier, Waterbury, Stowe and Morrisville. For each batch, Heyn will mill up to 500 pounds of wheat, rye, corn and spelt.
Heyn — who several years ago designed a wood-fired bread oven that is now sold around the country — would like to serve as a locus for the local grain and baking movement.
“We lost some of these skills and this knowledge of how to mill grain and grow grain on a different scale,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out how to bring that system back.”
