The home of stone-ground artisan flour ground by wind power
It’s National Mills Weekend this coming weekend and both mills in Swaffham Prior will be open on Sunday 10th May from 2pm to 5pm.
Learn more about our event here:
We hope you can join us. We’ll be posting further updates over the coming days. Our year so far has been incredible with a huge surge in weekly orders. We apologise if you’ve had to wait longer than usual for your deliveries – it’s been a challenge keeping up with our orders.
Thank you for your understanding and patience!
The last few months have been a whirlwind for the team at Priors Flour HQ! We’ve been inundated with orders from both our wonderful existing customer base and from a significant number of new customers. I’d therefore like to take this opportunity to share a little of my passion for baking, for great stoneground flour and for our fabulous milling heritage.
To those new to the Priors Flour range, I hope this short video provides some background to our work and to our most important asset, our Grade 2* listed working windmill which produces all your flours.
I could talk for hours about milling and baking, fingers crossed there is just enough here… but not too much!
If you like these kind of updates, please let me know. I refer to our purpose built mill shop and packing space in the video – I decided to leave that to another video, so watch out for that soon!
It’s been hugely gratifying to get a good deal of positive feedback about our Edelmann variety high protein milling wheat which is powering your white and wholemeal bread flours. We’re delighted you are enjoying baking with it.
Jon Cook, The Priors Flour
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.
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!
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.
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:
