We are delighted to announce that our heritage grain blend “Millers Choice” is at last, back in stock! The grain is once again grown by Paul Bowler (Durie & Partners) at Camp Green Farm near Stowmarket, Suffolk (see Paul’s photo below in a field of Millers Choice grain!). The grain is from Paul’s 2025 harvest.

Below, I share the history of this wheat population and what you can, once again, look forward to!

Millers Choice is known as a wheat “population” – it is a collection of different varieties of wheat which have similar characteristics, varieties that date back to the 18th and 19th Centuries. Created, or curated by Andy Forbes of the Brockwell Bake Association, Andy took a selection of wheat berries (seeds) from another population put together from seed banks by John Letts (organic farmer and grain specialist) and created a population with a strong dominance of Lammas type varieties. Lammas varieties dominated in the British Isles up until the mid 19th Century and were renowned for their bread baking qualities.

To this population he added 20% of Spanish long straw variety grains to improve the populations ability to withstand drought.

The result is a wheat population which produces a soft, creamy flour with huge flecks of golden bran with bags of flavour.

Here we see the Millers Choice grain growing – look carefully (right click on the image and you can open it in a new tab) and you will see that the ears of wheat in the photo are different – some have hairs, some are almost ripe, some are still green. You are looking at the different varieties of wheat in the population, all with their subtly different characteristics. These characteristics make the crop much more resilient to different climatic conditions – rather than the whole crop struggling, some varieties struggle whilst others thrive!

I am still experimenting with the flours to fully explore the baking characteristics, but I share below some images from the Brockwell Bake of Millers Choice White flour baked off into delicious boules!

Our Millers Choice wheat is grown at Camp Green Farm, Debenham, Suffolk. You can now purchase wholemeal and white Millers Choice flours from our mill shop (online or in person). We are grateful to Andy Forbes and to Durie Partners for their help in preparing this article.

As 2025 comes to a close, I write to thank you for your business and support over the last year, to wish you a Happy Christmas and to let you know our cut-off date to ensure you get your flour orders before Christmas!

It’s been quite a year here at Priors Flour HQ, work to build our production infrastructure with the move to our new Grain Store, maintenance work on the windmill and serving lots of new as well as existing customers.

As you will have seen from previous posts, we now have a lovely “vintage” milling wheat from the 2025 harvest which is getting great feedback – in production for our white and wholemeal bread flours. In the New Year, we will bring back on-stream Millers Choice and another heritage grain, so watch out for posts announcing their launch.

Final date for pre-Christmas orders

To guarantee your flour delivery before Christmas, please order by the 17th December. The shop opens on the 18th December and will re-open on the 8th January 2026.

Happy Christmas and our best wishes for the New Year 2026!

The first week of December has been a momentous week for the Priors Flour. We have commissioned our new Grain Store and taken delivery of a fantastic parcel of high protein (13.8%) milling wheat from the 2025 harvest. You have a real treat in store baking with our 2025 harvest white and wholemeal additive-free organic bread flours!

2025 Harvest Edelmann Wheat

We have been lucky to secure a parcel of Edelmann variety milling wheat from the Ednaston Estate in Derbyshire. As you will have read from previous posts, the 2025 harvest was challenging in many ways, the drought led to grain being smaller, lower yielding, but also higher protein (important because this is what creates the gluten in the dough). We tested 6 samples of wheat, a number from farms in East Anglia. The best sample was the one from the Ednaston Estate. Edelmann is a continental variety of wheat, a winter wheat (sown in the autumn), a new variety – but one cultivated from heritage varieties of grain. It is tall stemmed and has well developed leaf structure which enables it to better out-compete weeds in an organic system.

As you can see from the photos, our 2025 harvest white & wholemeal flours produce a fantastic loaf, whether you are working with sourdough, yeasted or machine processes. There is bags of flavour, a lovely light crumb and an extensible dough as you build your loaves! We know you will enjoy it.

New Grain Store

Over the last two months we have been planning and then moving our grain store to Adventurers Farm on the Ely side of Swaffham Prior. We are grateful to Newton Farms Ltd for their help in establishing our store in a modern building, Rob and his team for moving our grain bins and associated infrastructure and James Wilmott and our other friends for their help and support; it has been a major undertaking. The new building offers us greater capacity and ability to scale the Priors Flour business. Here you see the new grain being blown into our storage bins:

The new flours are available here!

We are pleased to advise that following a short “out of stock” situation (due to a grain quality issue), we are re-stocked with spelt grain.

We are also pleased to announce that we have begun sourcing our spelt grain from Craggs & Co of Sedgefield. Where possible, we source our grains from East Anglia, but where we find best quality grains available elsewhere, we will bring them to you!

We will be updating our “meet our suppliers” pages shortly with information about Craggs farms.

Over the last few weeks we have had a number of enquiries from customers about the addition of folic acid to flour. As you will probably be aware, legislation has now been implemented adding folic acid to flour along with the other fortificants required under the Bread & Flour Regulations 1998. As I explain below, the Priors Flour is now entirely free of additives, including folic acid.

Since the 1940s, the UK Bread & Flour Regulations have existed to require flours to contain minimum amounts of essential vitamins and minerals for the protection of human health. In practice, this has meant that non-wholemeal flours have been fortified with a very small amount of additives including calcium carbonate, iron, thiamin (vitamin B1), and niacin (vitamin B3). Whilst there has been significant debate about the effectiveness of these additives, and many of us would have preferred not to have had to add them to flour, this has been the law and the Priors Flour has worked to meet its obligations in this regard.

This has always been challenging for traditional mills (wind and watermills) because the production process does not lend itself to the uniform addition of tiny amounts of fortificant. The uneven “dosing” which traditional mills typically achieved using the basic machinery available (adding the fortificant during the flour sieving process) presented no risks / issues to health. However, when successive governments (since the 1990s) made clear their desire to fortify flour with folic acid, this became a major issue for traditional mills.

Millers are not medics, so along with other members of the Traditional Cornmillers Guild, we have always acknowledged that we cannot comment on the efficacy of fortifying flour as a route to reducing the number of neural tube defects in unborn babies – a key aspiration of the drive for mandatory fortification of flour with folic acid.

What we did recognise, with authority, was that the traditional milling process could not be either adapted or used to dose flour uniformly and as a result, there was a significant risk if traditional mills were required to fortify flour with folic acid. Put simply, traditional mills would have had to stop milling certain flours for human consumption, putting their future viability at serious risk.

As Chairman of the Traditional Cornmillers Guild, I led a campaign over 15 years to raise awareness of these issues, working with a team and latterly with other organisations such as the Real Bread Campaign to engage with DEFRA and the Department for Health. I am pleased to say that with support from politicians and members of the House of Lords our voices were increasingly heard and were were invited to join a working group set up by DEFRA to explore fortification of flour with folic acid.

As a result of this work and the subsequent consultations that followed, an exemption was agreed meaning that “small mills” (producing less than 500 tonnes of non-wholemeal flours) would not only be exempted from the requirement to add folic acid, but also exempted from adding the other additivies required under the Bread & Flour Regulations. This wider exemption was necessary because it was not financially viable for the company that produces the cocktail of additives added to flour to produce a variation of the product without folic acid, small mills using such a tiny amount when compared to the commercial roller mills in the UK.

It was concluded that given the tiny proportion of flour produced by “small mills”, this would have no material effect on the overall health benefits afforded by fortifying flour.

As I stated above, we as a business have always worked to meet what is required in law. Our personal preference has always been to supply unadulterated flour. Happily, that preference has now been made a reality as the law has now changed, as I have explained.

Please note – whilst our labels have now been updated, we still have a stock of pre-printed 1.5kg white flour bags which include the fortificants on the ingredients label. We cannot afford to “trash” all these bags (nor believe that environmentally , so will use up the stock of bags before ordering new ones with the fortificant information removed.

Happy Baking – if you need to ‘top up’ your flour stocks – follow the link!