Prior's Flour

The home of stone-ground artisan flour ground by wind power

  • Home
  • Prior’s Flour
    • Our Partners
    • Meet our Suppliers
  • Online Shop
    • Bread Flours
    • Cake and Baking Flours
    • Oats and Muesli
    • Grains for Home Milling
    • Gifts and Presents
  • My Basket
  • Fosters Mill
  • Latest News
  • Contact Us

24th April 2016 By Jon Cook

The Story behind our Mulika Wheat

Customers often ask me where our wheat comes from and what happens to it along the way from growing in a field to arriving at the mill ready to be turned into organic flour. So, here’s the story:

We have had the privilege to work with Richard Morris and his team at Home Farm, Wimople for the last five years. The farm is part of the National Trust Wimpole estate. Richard runs a mixed organic farmRichard Morris 1 including producing over 100 acres of wheat. For the last few years, he has grown the variety Mulika, a relatively recently cultivated variety which is related to Paragon. Mulika grows well under organic conditions and Richard has been able to grow wheat with a protein content of >12%, a key factor required for milling wheat. Wheat with less than 12% protein is unlikely to make good bread as the dough structure does not have enough gluten to hold the bubbles of carbon dioxide produced by the yeast fermentation process.Grain store

When the wheat is ripe, typically in early September, Richard and his team combine the wheat and store it in the Home Farm grain store. It’s important that the wheat rests for a period to allow the organic matter which is harvested with the grains to dry off and the bugs and insects that come in with the harvest to disappear out of the grain heap. The photo to the right shows the monitors we use to ensure that the harvest is free of weevils and beetles before it is moved off farm for the next stage of the process.

Once the grain is ready, it is moved to Hammonds End Farm, Harpenden where Howard and Stuart Roberts dry, clean, bag and store the wheat ready for transportation to the mill.

Arrival & Drying

When the wheat arrives, it is still wet and full of chaff, seeds, bits of straw.

Filling the dryer 2

Here you can see the wheat as it is loaded into the dryer, an oil fired drying machine which pushes warm air through the wheat reducing the moisture from around 17% at the point it arrives at Hammonds End to around 12-13%, the ideal moisture content at which to store wheat to keep it in fantastic condition!

 

Drying

The machine is huge – a great place to hide on a cold winters’ day with the warm air coming off the wheat stack!

Dried grain storage in silos

Once the wheat has been processed, it is stored ready for cleaning, the process used to remove everything apart from the large quality grains that will be milled into your flour!

Cleaning & Bagging 

The final stage of the process before the wheat is stored ready for shipment involves cleaning the wheat to remove the chaff, straw, seeds, dust and muck that is harvested along with the grains of wheat. We also need to remove the small shriveled grains that are no good for milling and to polish the wheat grains to ensure they are in tip-top condition ready to mill. All this is done in a machine called a Gravity Table Separator. The wheat is passed through a series of table sieves which remove all the unwanted bits and pieces:

Gravity seperator 2 Here you can see the wheat being shaken across one of the sieves, cleaning it as it goes. This process is critical as it ensures there is no chaff in the wheat sample which we mill.

The final stage is to bag up the wheat ready for palletised storage until we are ready to receive the wheat at Fosters Mill. Given the fact Fosters Mill is a small tower mill, we are only able to accept wheat in 25kg sacks. With 40 sacks to a metric tonne, we get through a lot of paper sacks! You’ll be pleased to know they are re-used and then recycled..

Bagging grain We mill over 25 tonnes of wheat each year. We are really grateful for the help and support we get from Richard and his team at Home Farm and from Stuart, Howard and Chas at Hammonds End Farm. It’s a real team effort to get our wheat ready for milling, one which ensures everything is set for milling our delicious Prior’s Flour!

 

 

 

 

 

The Mulika wheat is used to produce:

Cambridge White

Cambridge Wholemeal

Wheaten Meal

Malted Maltiseed

Filed Under: News

Subscribe to our newsletter

Keep up to date with the latest news at Priors Flour

Privacy Policy

We treat your email address with the utmost respect. We promise we will never spam you or sell your details on.

Glad I don’t run a post mill! The climb to works Glad I don’t run a post mill! The climb to works taking its toll🤪here at Windmill Hill Mill!
What a corker of an evening on top of Cambridgeshi What a corker of an evening on top of Cambridgeshire! Painting the gallery rail to keep cool! #fostersmill #windmill
Stunning evening on top of the fens! Stunning evening on top of the fens!
Fosters Mill at rest! Been a busy week, lots of or Fosters Mill at rest! Been a busy week, lots of orders going out all over the country! Milled our first sample of 2023 harvest wheat, so test baking tomorrow! #fostersmill #organicflour #priorsflour
Perfect milling conditions, wind from the North Ea Perfect milling conditions, wind from the North East, free of buildings and turbulence! Straight from the Urals!! #fostersmill #windmill #priorsflour

Connect with us

  • Instagram
  • Twitter
Soil Association Organic LogoCorn Miller's Guild Logo

Copyright © 2015 - 2023 Prior's Flour · Prior's Flour is a trading name of Prior Consulting (Cambridge) Ltd · Registered in England and Wales No: 4606269

Website by Callia Web Limited