Grist Mill and Sack Beater @museum.de

F: Groats, meal, flour – these days, a lot of people have no idea about the differences between these various forms of milled grain.

M: In simple terms, the difference lies in the degree of milling. Groats is the term for hulled grain that has just been very coarsely crushed. Meal is ground or crushed cereal that's much coarser than flour. And flour refers to very finely milled grain that contains virtually no hull particles.

F: Grist mills like this one once stood in the farmhouses or the hirelings' accommodation. They were used to crush barley after threshing. First, the barley grains were filled into a drum studded with nails. When the drum was turned, the hull was stripped from the grains, leaving pearl barley, which could then be coarsely ground into groats and fed to the livestock... or added to soup for the human occupants of the farm.

M: Households milled their own groats from oats or barley. But a visit to the mill was unavoidable if the grain was to be turned into meal or flour. The farmer delivered the grain by the sack... and took the meal back with him in the same sacks. To avoid confusion, all the sacks were labelled with the farmers' names.

F: And to keep everything nice and hygienic, the sacks had to be regularly beaten. Otherwise the fine weave could become infested with vermin. The specially designed machines operated more or less like mangles or clothes wringers. The sack was inserted through the opening into the box-shaped housing. This contained a rotating shaft on which several weighted leather straps were mounted. Those beaters now pounded the sack and knocked out the flour residues.

M: And afterwards, the sack was ready to be refilled.