We retired our trusty old grain mill recently. It's a Czech knockoff of a corona mill that I bought for $40 over the internet in 1995
from a shop that had a warehouse full of unused (And still in the box) Czech and Russian cooking equipment that he bought after the Berlin wall
fell.

We were still doing extract brews and steeping grains at the time. The mill was fine for that purpose. When we went to doing partial-mash brewing, the
mill was definitely up to the challenge. The beers kept coming, it kept grinding, and we kept drinking. Everyone was happy.

It milled the grains for the two batches of oatmeal stout that blew the lid off the fermenter, and sprayed the ceiling in Bruce's basement with black
goodness (His wife didn't appreciate it either time). It milled the grains for the batch of robust porter we made that won 3rd place in the Eastern CT
Hombrew Competition. It milled the grains for the infamous "Dartboard Ale" (Get Clay drunk and let him throw darts at a list of ingredients  we had on
hand --- could be good, could be godawful. All depended on where the darts landed). It ground the grains for wedding beers, birthday beers, Christmas
beers, Oktoberfest beers, everyday drinking beers, and party beers. It even hung in there after we went all-grain, despite our having to crank
endlessly to mill the much larger amounts of grain.

It ground grains for 12 years, and always gave us beer as a reward for our efforts. We discussed motorizing it, and were thinking up the best way to
do it even a few days before the decision was made to retire it. The last batch with the old mill was an IPA brewed for Bruce's 50th birthday party.
The beer came out right on the mark with color and gravity, and the brew session was flawless. A fitting last hurrah!

The reason for retiring the old mill was that I got my 15 year service award at work......$350 that I had to spend on tangible objects, or lose
the award. Some of it just had to buy beer making equipment! So, I ordered a Crankandstein adjustable mill with a hopper, crank handle, and baseplate.
The thoughts of a uniform, controlled crush, much less cranking to crush the same amount of grain, and the consistent brewhouse efficiency that we
could potentially achieve were just too good to pass up.

The new mill came, and I assembled it, and adjusted the rollers to .035" as a baseline gap. We use stainless steel screen manifolds in both of our
mashtuns, which are less likely to stick than our old false bottom was, so a healthy crush is fine. We had a beer to brew that wouldn't suffer any
consequences from a significant increase in efficiency (American Amber), so we set up the mill, and got out the hydrometer to see what would happen.

Brewing day came, and we cleaned the mill per the instructions, and measured out our grains. We filled the hopper, and started grinding. It
took about 7 or 8 minutes to grind the entire grain bill, and it could have gone faster had we not needed to figure out how to hold the mill securely
on the bucket. I think I'm going to come up with a clamping system, so it can be done solo if needed. Much faster than the old mill (By an order of 3
or 4 times faster), and only a little harder to crank. Great so far.

The new mill gave us an outstanding, consistent crush. There was only a little flour, and the hulls were not shredded. All looked good. Off to the
mashtun it went.

When the mash was done, we recirculated, and the wort cleared relatively quickly, and there were no signs of sticking. The sparge went very easily,
and we boiled and chilled. Then, the moment of truth..........we measured our volume in the fermenter, took a gravity reading, and.........84%
brewhouse efficiency!!!!  We had been consistently getting 63 - 67% before this, so the increase was huge. Bruce walked out into the garage, looked at
the old mill, and said: "You're retired". 'Nuff said.

Now, we have to go through all of our recipes, and re-work them based on our new system efficiency (Using ProMash, this is real easy to do), once we
get consistent results over 2 or 3 batches. Extra work for a good reason is always welcome.

So, after all these years, the old Porkert mill is retired to the shelves out in Bruce's garage. It's like a shiny old friend sitting there, waiting
to grind one more batch for us to drink. We'd do well to give it to someone local that's getting into brewing, and let it continue to serve its
destiny to grind grains for beer, and make people happy.