Brew days are long and hard. Finding a way to automate as many tasks as possible keeps the day to a minimum. Grinding the grain by hand cranking or attaching a drill to my mill is too much hassle. Thus, I decided to motorize my mill.

First off, buying a mill is not necessary for home brewing. Every homebrewing store has a mill that you can use. Most on-line shops will mill your grain for a small fee. The big advantage to buying a grain mill is that the malt (grain) stores better if it hasn't been cracked (milled). That allows you to buy the malt in bulk such as 55 lb sacks and keep a few bucks in your wallet.

I bought the gear motor on Ebay for $10. It runs at 29 RPM and at 20 in-lb of torque. That's a little slow and a little weak. Ideally, I would get one that runs at about 150 RPM and 60 in-lb of torque. Hindsight is so 20-20.

Most people that have motorized their mills use a motor that runs at 1700 or 3600 RPM. They have to use pulleys and a fan belt to gear the mill down to 300 RPM. I like my fingers and have a young daughter that could be walking about anytime on brew day. The gear motor eliminates the need for a pulley system.

To handle misalignment of the motor to the grain mill, use a Lovejoy connector. It has a piece of hard rubber that fits between the two shafts and allows for quite a bit of misalignment. The Lovejoy connector is also a lot cheaper than two pulleys and a belt (plus a belt guard if you use proper safety design).

Initial tests on the mill showed it runs a little slow and will stop if I adjust the rollers too close. I didn't have problems with the first batch which required 25 pounds of grain. I'll give it a few more batches before I make any modifications.

Now it's time to mount one of those motors over my liquor tank and boiler with a propellor for a stirrer. Stay tuned for an update....