• The Country Living Mill
• The Family Grain Mill
• The Back To Basics Grinder
• The Silver Nugget and the Little Ark
• The Corona/Victoria Grinders
• The Diamant

The Country Living Mill (CLM): I used to think the USA made CLM was over priced. Our tests have proved to me that the Country Living Mill is the best manual grinder you can get anywhere and well worth the money. Being a burr grinder, it gives quite a nice, fine grind the first time through. It is an easy grinder to turn and grinds fast. It will grind wheat to a nice flour twice as fast as the other grinders in the study. The Diamant is the one exception. However, the CLM's performance is roughly equivalent to the Diamant but $200 cheaper. The CLM is a wonderfully durable grinder. It actually uses ball bearings, the only grinder that doesn't use bushings. This grinder will last a lifetime, maybe several. The manufacturer says the burrs that come with the grinder should last the life of the grinder as well. The only burrs they're aware of that have worn out came from a grinder which was motorized years ago in a farm operation, then used for hours every day. Most grinders will never be subjected to this kind of use.       The CLM is light, being made of aluminum. For those of you with aluminum concerns, the CLM has what is called a 'powder coating' which is baked into an extremely hard protective coating. With the powder coating, you never have to worry about your grain coming into contact with the Aluminum. The burrs are made of hardened steel. In my tests, only the Family Grain Mill beat the CLM's efficiency. But because that grinder is such a light duty machine, grinding efficiency is the only comparison that can be made between the two grinders.       I ground 10 cups of wheat in 22 minutes with the CLM. It was not hard work. That extra long 7 inch knob was especially nice. The knob alone made the job so much nicer as I could easily use both hands on it. As much as I liked the knob, I'd have liked it even more if it was just one inch longer. For the first 5 cups of wheat ground, I used the power bar extension. For the second 5 cups I took the extension off. Because of the shorter radius I was able to turn the grinder even faster as it still wasn't that hard for me to turn. Women and children probably will need the extension, but should not find it a difficult grinder to operate. I personally own several different grinders. If times ever get tuff, I'm certain the CLM will be the very last grinder I'll give away when helping my neighbors. I just love this thing, and as a bonus, I think it's the prettiest grinder made.

Me, I like to mount grinders on the kitchen counter. The CLM can easily be mounted here by putting down a newspaper, then C clamp the grinder down. I use blocks of wood between the clamps and the grinder to protect that pretty powder coat finish. CLM without handle extension. CLM with handle extension. Face of CLM Burr

The Family Grain Mill: This little German made grinder really surprised me. I expected it to have about the same performance as the Back to Basics Grinder. This is because the Family Mill's cone burrs look so much like the Back to Basic's burrs. Was I ever wrong. As far as performance goes, this is one fine little grinder. It turns easy and is really fast.
      One draw back is it grinds only a coarse flour on the first grind. If you want a half decent flour you must put this coarse flour through a second time. Over the years I've picked up several prejudices concerning grinders. One of them has been, if you must put wheat through a grinder twice to get it fine enough to make bread, the grinder's not worth having. I found that putting the coarse flour from the first grind through the Family Grain Mill a second time just wasn't a big thing. During the second pass, the handle turns almost effortlessly so the second grind is really easy. And even including the second pass in the efficiency calculation, the Family Grain Mill is the only grinder I tested that had a better efficiency ratio than the Country Living Mill, the acknowledged champ of grinders. After the second grind, the flour was about the same fineness as the Country Living Mill.
      It took me 41 minutes to put 10 cups of wheat through the Family Grain Mill twice. As already stated, we needed that second grind to improve the flour fineness as it grinds so coarsely during the first pass. As it's an easy turning grinder, this would be a fine grinder for women or children.
      There's several things I also don't like about the Family Grain Mill. Speaking of the physical aspects of the grinder itself, there's not that much to it. The 1.1" thick plywood base is made out of 17 layers of wood. It's expensive plywood, but a small block this size shouldn't cost much. Most parts are made from plastic, including the body. These parts are small and couldn't have cost that much to make, either.

The Family Grain Mill internal parts. Not shown is the plastic drive from the crank which turns the plastic auger (left) which turns the rotating burr (second from right). The non-rotating burr is shown second from left and the fineness control that connects to the rotating burr is on the right. Aside from the clamp to attach the grinder to the counter top, the crank handle and the two burrs, every part of this grinder is made from plastic including two parts of the drive mechanism.

The grinder itself is small and two of the interconnecting drive pieces are made out of light weight plastic. I have my concerns if these plastic drive pieces would stand up to long term use, especially if larger seeds such as beans or corn were ground. Of all the grinders in the test, this grinder seems to be the least rugged of the bunch and would probably break the first.
      When I buy something I like to think I've got my money's worth. Because there really isn't much, physically, to this grinder, it doesn't seem like it's worth anywhere near the $126.00 it costs. However, if you look at it's performance compared to the other grinders, it's worth every penny, and then some. Another plus, the Family Grain Mill has several attachments, one of them being a flaker mill. The flaker can take oats or any other grain about the size of wheat or smaller and roll them. I've been told it won't roll hard wheat as it's too hard but I didn't have any trouble when I tried it. I like the way the flaker works.
      I'd really like to get a few reports from people who have put a couple of tons of wheat through these things to learn if this grinder holds up under long term use. A great performing grinder, which this one is, isn't worth very much if it won't pass the test of time.
      Since writing the above I have talked to the importer who for 8 years has been supplying these mills to different retailers in North America. They are aware of only one mill that has broken the plastic drive in all that time. They added that the mill grinds beans and grains just fine. Popcorn is the only seed they don't recommend grinding in the Family Grain Mill.
      As we don't sell the Family Grain Mill, probably the cheapest place you can get it is from Jennifer Mathes out of Bartlet Kansas. Her phone number is 620-226-3378.

The Back To Basics Grinder: This is the smallest grinder we tested and also the least expensive. It's also the slowest grinder, and requires the wheat to be ground twice to get a sufficiently fine flour to make decent bread. This little grinder is all metal except for the top of the funnel which is plastic. The drive mechanism is steel from one end of it to the other unlike the Family Grain Mill which uses plastic pieces.
      I personally don't own one of these grinders, so I borrowed one for the test. This first grinder took 25 minutes to grind one cup of wheat during the 1 cup test. I called another friend who also has one of these grinders and she told me her grinder was a lot faster than that. Using her grinder, I ground a cup of wheat in only 6 minutes. I took the first grinder apart and found that the burr cone was damaged. It looked like someone had ground wheat with a little piece of metal in it and had dulled the little teeth on the burrs. The small grinding teeth, instead of being broken off like you would expect if it was made from good quality steel, were instead bent over, reflecting soft steel. When I took this grinder back to it's owner, he said he'd only had it for a year and didn't know when it became damaged. I can only expect the burrs are made out of too soft a metal. So if you get one of these grinders, you need to be extra mindful to only grind very clean wheat. Your grinder will drastically loose it's efficiency in just a second or two if it encounters a kernel sized piece of metal.
      It took me 80 minutes to grind 10 cups of wheat with the undamaged Back to Basics grinder. This included the time it took to put the wheat through twice as it grinds so coarsely on the first pass. I really don't like this grinder because it takes so long to grind a bunch of wheat. Even turning it at 120 rpm, which is about as fast as you can turn it, it takes 6 minutes to run a cup of wheat through this thing twice. The second time through, the coarse flour doesn't feed well through the hopper and must be continually worked down with a table knife or a similar instrument. The other grinders in this study got me too spoiled to put up with how slow this mill grinds.
     

Using a yogurt cup, this is what one woman did to extend the output 3 inches from the grinder. Simple and smart.

The drive and burrs for the Back to Basics Grinder has no interconnecting pieces. The crank handle turns the rotating burr. The stationary burr is built into the grinder body.

The Sunshine Nugget

The Little Ark

The Silver Nugget and the Little Ark: I'm putting these two grinders together because they both grind so similarly. They look nothing alike on the outside, but it's what's inside that counts. Both the Nugget and Little Ark, because of their stones, give the finest ground flour of the manual grinders I tested. But there's a price to pay for that finely ground flour. These grinders are harder turning, requiring 11 lbs of pressure on the handle. It's a lot of work to turn these grinders for a long period of time. By the time I had finished grinding 10 cups of wheat with these grinders I felt like I had a new set of muscles. It was a lot of work. The ten cup grind test took me 47 minutes with the Little Ark and 43 minutes with the Silver Nugget with the stone spacing set at 0.005 inch. I ask the wife and Tammy, a fellow employee, to see how long they could crank it at one time. Five minutes was about 'it' and then they were 'done.' My feelings are this is not a good grinder for the average woman or child, or especially for someone who is aged, as the Nugget or Little Ark do require a big effort to produce enough flour to make a four loaf batch of bread.
      A negative point, I didn't like the grooved knob on the Nugget. I can only guess they put grooves in it so the knob could be the more easily grasped. However, because of a lack of bearing surface between the knob and handle, it's easier to let the knob turn in your hand than to force the bolt to rotate between the knob and the handle. When this happens the grooves in the knob rotating in the hand get the skin sore much more quickly than if it was a smooth knob. The Little Ark's knob doesn't rotate easily where it attaches to the handle, either. But as it's knob is round and smooth it's much less of a bother. A soft, cloth work glove would solve this problem with both grinders. It takes about the same amount of energy to turn these grinders with the burrs installed. With the burrs, the flour produced is a bit more coarse, about the same fineness as the flour produced by the Country Living Mill.
     

The stones and burrs for the Little Ark. The stones are on the left; the burrs on the right. The faces of the stones and burrs for the Nugget look exactly the same.

Like the Country Living Mill, both these grinders can be motorized. It would take quite a bit of trouble to do this, however, as there needs to be an idler pulley between the motor and grinder. Going straight from the motor to the grinder would turn the grinder far too fast. They recommend the grinder not turn faster than 120 RPM, or even slower. The makers of the Little Ark sell a kit for this purpose, but you must furnish your own motor. Both the Little Ark and the Nugget have long bushings for their bearings. These bushings can't be as durable as the ball bearings in the Country Living Mill. I've talked with a couple of different people who have motorized them. They say after years of use the drive shaft still sits tightly in the bushing. So, it must be good enough.
      The Nugget grinds about 33% faster than the Little Ark because of an improved feed mechanism which is also reflected in the Nugget's price. Me - every time, I'd go with the grinder that ground more quickly. There is so much work involved in producing flour from these grinders that it would be worth the extra $40 dollars to have a grinder that made flour a little quicker. In my opinion, the Nugget looks a little better as well, especially the Sunshine Nugget with it's Country Living Mill like powder coat. The Little Ark and the Nugget are made by two different companies just blocks from each other here in the USA.

The Corona/Victoria Grinders: Really, these two grinders are virtually identical, both of them being made by Corona, in Columbia, South America. The biggest difference between these two grinders is the Victoria costs an extra $20.00. All the important parts come from the same mold. I really have nothing good to say about these grinders. On the first grind with the burrs set as tightly as I could set them and still be able to easily crank the handle, the grinder barely cracked the wheat. In fact, a few kernels were still whole. On the second run, the grinder broke the wheat down a little further to about the point of regular cracked wheat. Running the cracked wheat through more times didn't improve the grind. I've read posts on the different forums from people who say they have made bread from the wheat they ground in a Corona. Me, I'd really like to see what that pitiful bread must have looked like. It had to be as heavy as a rock.
      This grinder can not be mounted on your kitchen counter like all the other grinders in the study. This is because there are protruding ridges on the bottom of the mount that are designed to sink down into the soft wood of a board. I mounted it to a 2X8 for the grinding test and the mount did hold it very securely to the board. While I was tightening the clamp, I got a hammer and tapped rather heavily on the mount, trying to set the ridges down into the board. On the first strike of the hammer I broke a corner off the mount. I didn't hit it that hard! The frame of the Corona is made of cast iron, and not even that good of cast iron.
      The Corona has a thin plating on the outside which is probably chrome. This plating is also on the burr faces and worm feed. This is a real problem because the cracked wheat that comes out of the grinder has an occasional metal flake in it. The chrome may very well be a recent improvement to keep the grinder from rusting. In doing my research, I talked with a lady whose father sold hundreds of these things several years ago. She said she remembers seeing dozens of Coronas in the back room rusting away.
     

Broken Corona mount. See text above.

This is the impression the Corona or Victoria mounts put into a piece of wood - the reason you can't mount these grinders on your kitchen counter.

     Company          Phone            Description          Price

The Retsel Company 208-254-3737  Corona Stone Kit PN CS88   33.95
Nazko Engineering  208-254-3661  Corona Stone Kit w/Auger   39.95

The Diamant Grinder: (The following information forwarded by Don Craig of Kentucky whose comments and photos follow:)

The Diamant

          Diamant's Model D - 525 Grain Mill was used for the test. I ground 6 cups of flour in two passes. The Diamant will grind finely in the first pass. However, I have found it's much easier to grind it coarsely then grind it a second time at the fine setting. In total between the two grinds, it took me 1090 revolutions at 80 RPM which required a time of 13:31 to turn this into a very fine flour.

Observations

1. The flywheel, axle and one burr (the rotating parts) equal 21 lbs so once this weight is turning, the momentum (inertia) makes grinding easier than mills without a heavy flywheel.
2. The flywheel handle is longer. Two people can turn it by facing each other, each person using one hand to turn the flywheel.
3. The mill contains a 3 inch long brass bushing between the housing and the drive shaft for long life.
4. The flywheel has a groove for a "V" belt if motorization is desired.
5. The mill weighs 53 lbs. Bolting the mill down is recommended.
6. A wheeled cart was built to secure, move and provide a storage space for two buckets of grain underneath the mill. The cart is higher than a standard counter top so the mill handle is at shoulder height to reduce fatigue when grinding.

   The Diamant Disassembled

7. The Diamant grinds any material, dry or containing moisture.
8. Mill comes with wrench, screwdriver and parts list.
9. Mill accessories not included but available: stone burrs and cast iron burrs of different degrees of fineness.
10. As the flour is hot to the touch as it exits many electric mills, the heat generated may damage the vitamin E content of the flour. The 80 RPM average hand speed in this test using the Diamant didn't heat the flour in any way.
11. Here are the results for a second timed grinding test:
    I performed two tests using 3 cups of Hard Red Wheat and then again with 3 cups Hard White Wheat to make a total of 9 cups of very fine flour. I milled the grain twice but this time I attempted to make the effort and revolutions the same for the first and the second grind. I measured the threads per inch on the adjustment screw that pushes the rotary burr against the stationary burr so that the burr to burr distance could be determined.
    • First Milling - 0.018", 712 revolutions
    • Second Milling - 0.006", 695 revolutions
    The 1407 Revolutions took 21.6 minutes or 65 RPM. Nine cups of very fine flour were produced from 6 cups of grain, or 156 Revolutions per cup of flour.

Don built this stand for his Diamant. He connected the legs to the top with table leg mounts. The leg bottoms have a screw coming up through the bottom panel into the legs. There are casters on the bottom to roll the stand around. This platform is very stable. With the cart weight, the 53 lb grinder and two 48 lb buckets of wheat on the bottom shelf, Don says the legs don't wobble and the stand doesn't roll around on it's casters when the grinder is cranked. Don suggested putting it on a carpet if for some reason the casters did roll a bit.

Don's Comments On Flours:

1. "The Joy of Cooking" by Rombauer and Becker gives excellent descriptions of many types of flour and how they are used.
2. Using 1/2 whole wheat and 1/2 white flour makes a very light bread with a good taste.

Fine vs Coarse flour

3. Some recipes including pancakes can be made with a coarser flour for a different texture and taste (some recipes even call for some corn meal).
4. Whole wheat or "graham flour" from the grocery store is not the very finest flour yet it makes good bread, I used this type of flour before getting my Diamant.
5. Some cast iron burrs can produce as fine as flour as stone burrs, it is a function of the design of the burrs and not just the material.

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Revised: 26 Jun 00