This is a super old thread, but I have some experience that contradicts the conventional wisdom.
TL;DR: Yes, it is possible.
So I recently got a flour mill in the hopes of using it for both flour and cracking malt for beer. The one I got is the Hawos Billy 100, but I expect it would work with a lot of them.
Out of the box, a flour mill at the most coarse setting will likely be just too fine for beer. It rips up the hulls and makes it about 50/50 cracked grain to flour. What I had to do was simply remove the hopper and the top part of the housing of the mill, and where the lever to open and close the milling stones would normally stop, i just take out the lever and manually move it past the coarsest setting.
The outcome from two brews so far is that yes, there’s slightly more flour. But the hulls remain intact, and my sparge was maybe a little slower but it wasn’t stuck. efficiency was 80%.
The only issue is that I had two Litres more losses than normal, likely because the finer crack and the amount of flour held more water in the sparge.
After the boil there was no scorching, so again I don’t think there was too much flour. for my first batch my efficiency was way higher, but it turned out to be because of the losses during the sparge, but 80% is still great in my books.
Fyi i’m using a grainfather for my brews. I don’t know about BIAB or conventional mash tun brewing.
So i’m going to continue to use the flour mill for my beers. It’s super stylish, the wife loves it, enough so that it has a place on the counter rather than being tucked back into the closet.
(in about two or three years from now, that is...)
