Cleaning wheat berries
Hi All. First time poster. I've come to home milling kind of through the back door. I decided to challenge myself this year and keep our wheat harvest for ourselves instead of selling it off to the local feed company as most of my neighbors do. I loved the idea of the added flavor and health benefits of fresh flour. Our wheat is fresh from the combine - so in other words, filthy :)
I have a Mockmill and I'm going to purchase a vibrating sifter with sieves of 40 and 50 mesh.
My question is regarding cleaning the wheat berries. I wanted to buy two more mesh sizes that would enable me to remove any debris that is either larger or smaller than my wheat berries. I tried googling for this information but I couldn't find anything amidst all of the flour noise in the results.
Anyone out there use course mesh sieves to clean their berries?
Thanks,
Ira
Commercially, it's not unheard of. I'm not sure if they do that for wheat, but I've seen a corn cleaner that sorts based on kernel size.
Since you already have your wheat, I'd take some calipers and measure a handful of kernels and use that to determine your mesh sizes for cleaning.
Depending on the size of your wheat, it looks like #5 or #6 should remove large debris and #10 should remove small debris.
Thank you! Will give it a shot
Just wanted to tell you that I asked the seller on Ali Express what he thought I should use to clean my wheat berries and he also suggested #6 and #10 :)
Good to see Farmers value adding and im pretty sure you will easily find at the gate customers for both your wheat and flour good luck and it might be worth looking at some specialty seed wheats both for yourself and possible future customers wishing you the very best of luck. Here in Australia they have mobile cleaning units that come in and clean the grain either before it goes into the silo or when it comes out if its going to be planted.
regard Derek
Thanks for the kind words. That's an amazing service! Here there's a commercial seed cleaner about a half hour away, but really don't like the idea of moving around my 18 or so tons on the road. Aside from the big expense.
18 tons - that is a *lot* of wheat to clean/mill/bake. Your Mockmill is in for a workout! Or maybe I am missing something (often the case). Are you keeping that for you and your family or planning on selling some of the wheat vs flour after cleaning? Just curious is all, kudos on your project!
Nope, didn't miss anything! 18 Metric tons. Most of it will go to my chickens over the year. We'll use whatever we need to consume over the year and the rest I'm going to try to sell freshly milled flour in my local area.
of course you could make use of one of those leaf blowers that will sort the wheat from the chaff literally there are some good u tube video on winnowers and shouldnt be to hard to make i made a small one for bird seed where i used a computer fan but you would need something a little stronger and the leaf blower blowing a good stream of air up as the grain tumbles down with gravity will get rid of some of the dust and lighter debris. We look forward to seeing some pictures of the wheat the dough and the bread.
regards Derek