Grain mill

Try a few amounts at some different intervals and let us know. I've never done it but I'm imaging the following issues would come into play with the vitamin: pulverizing husks, over smallifying kernels, take a long time depending on how much you were trying to process, non-uniform grindification of grains. But I've only used a vitamin in my head so absolutely no firsthand real experience.

Never messed with grain attachment on mixer.

 

Never used either, but have considered those options. You want to avoid shredding husks as much as possible. The Vitamix will be too fast and will probably shred husks. The Kitchen aid would probably work like a corona mill, looks similar to me, but for that price you can buy a better performing mill or a corona mill for much less.

 

I would not use any type of blender or food processor for grain. It's going to be hard to get a consistent result without blending down the grain to a high level of powder. That, plus the destroyed husks, is a good way to live a life of stuck mashes/sparges.

The KA mill is pretty much a powered corona mill. For its price you could buy a nicer mill and power it with a drill. Plate grinders, like corona mills and the KA attachment, do not produce the even milling of a roller mill and is not really designed for cracking grain. They are designed to make flour. I will tell you that I have a corona mill that I have used for the past five years and learned to modify and adjust it to work almost as well as a roller mill but if I had it to do over again I would have just bought a roller mill. (Someday I will upgrade.) The KA mill probably adjusts more accurately than a corona mill but there is a lot of talk that using it for extended periods of time, like you will milling grain for a batch, will destroy the gears in the KA mixer. That alone is a very good reason not to buy one for brewing.

 

I would use a food processor before a blender. I'd assume you'll dull the blades of either pretty quick and end up with little too much flour. I'd also assume that the grain mill on a Kitchen Aid is going to make flour only and really grind the hulls of the grain too fine. I'll look into this and post back if I hear otherwise.

I did hear about someone trying to dimple the rollers on a spaghetti maker and he had decent success there.

 

The Kitchen Aid attachment is for making flour. Not really appropriate. Before I got my grain mill (which I have used only twice), I would buy base malt, crushed, on a batch by batch basis, but get specialty grains, uncrushed, which I would keep for more than one batch. I would pulse the specialty grains in a food processor until they got broken up quite a bit.

 

Some brewers have success with a Corona mill. It's pretty cheap and I think you can make an adapter so that you can hook a drill up to it. It should be able to crush coarse enough for you and crush fine enough to make flour for the misses.