Choosing a Grain Mill
This is a buying guide, not a review. There is no mill in this kitchen yet. Everything below comes from manufacturers' published specifications and from bakers who have used these machines — it is enough to choose with, and it is not the same as having run a sack of wheat through all four.
When a mill does arrive here it will get a review, and that review will say so plainly.
First: do you need one at all?
A countertop stone mill is a real purchase, in the same bracket as a stand mixer. Before it earns the counter space, it should be doing something bagged flour cannot.
What it actually gives you:
- Flour that has not gone stale. This is the whole argument. Bran carries oils, and those oils go rancid within weeks of milling. Bagged whole wheat is almost never as fresh as it sounds, and the difference in flavour is not subtle.
- Grains nobody bags. Rye at the coarseness you want, spelt, corn for polenta, rice flour, dry beans.
- Control of the grind. One machine gives you cracked grain for porridge and fine flour for bread.
- The end of the chain if you are growing your own — see Growing Your Own Flour, which is where the rest of that story is.
What it does not give you: cheaper flour, in any honest accounting. Whole berries cost less per pound than bagged flour, but not by enough to pay off a $300 machine quickly. Buy a mill for freshness and range. If the case has to be made on money, the case is weak.
Stone or impact
Settled elsewhere on this site, so briefly: for bread flour, stone. It grinds cooler, which protects the bran oils that carry the flavour; it adjusts from cracked grain to fine; and it is quieter. Impact mills are faster and only do fine. The full comparison is in the grain guide.
Everything below is a stone mill.
The four things that actually differ
1. Speed — and why it is usually the upsell
Countertop mills are rated in grams of flour per minute. Around 100 g/min covers one loaf's flour in about five minutes. Doubling that halves a five-minute job on a bake that takes eighteen hours.
Speed is worth paying for if you mill several pounds at a sitting — a big family, a baking co-op, a stall. For one or two loaves a week it is the feature you are most likely to overbuy.
2. Warranty — the number people skip
This is an electric motor driving abrasive stones through dusty material. Warranty length is the manufacturer telling you what they expect the machine to survive, and across these four it ranges from five years to twelve. That spread is a bigger real difference than any spec on the box.
Mockmill is widely quoted as giving a twelve-year warranty. That is true of the Lino and Professional models. The polymer-housed Mockmill 100 and 200 — the ones most people are actually comparing — carry six years for household use. If a review quotes you twelve, check which machine it is describing.
3. Fineness
All four use corundum-ceramic stones and all four will make bread flour. Reviewers who have run them side by side generally put Mockmill's flour ahead of the NutriMill Harvest's at the fine end. If you mostly want coarse meal and cracked grain, this matters less than the price difference.
4. What it is made of
The Mockmill 100 and 200 are housed in a bio-polymer. The KoMo is wood, the Harvest is bamboo. This is mostly aesthetics — the milling happens between the same kind of stones either way — but wood is heavier, quieter in feel, and does not scuff the way plastic does over a decade on a counter.
The four, compared
| Mockmill 100 | Mockmill 200 | NutriMill Harvest | KoMo Fidibus Classic | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Motor | 360 W | 600 W | 450 W | 360 W |
| Rate | ~100 g/min | ~200 g/min claimed | 128 g/min claimed; slower in practice at the fine end | not published |
| Stones | corundum-ceramic | corundum-ceramic, 3.5″ | corundum | corundum-ceramic, 3″ |
| Housing | bio-polymer | bio-polymer | bamboo | wood |
| Warranty | 6 yr | 6 yr | 5 yr | 12 yr |
| Where it sits on price | the entry point | the middle — close enough that today's price should decide | the premium end | |
Prices move, and a stale number in a buying guide is worse than none — someone budgets against it and finds out at the checkout. The same reason the baking calculators hold no ingredient prices and the seed schedule ships no frost date: the durable part goes on the page, the part that changes stays with the source. Check the current figure at a retailer before you commit.
Which one
- Baking one or two loaves a week, and want the least you can spend without regretting it — the Mockmill 100. The finest flour of the group, fast enough for that volume, and the cheapest of the four. This is the recommendation for most people reading this site.
- Buying once and keeping it — the KoMo Fidibus Classic. Twelve years of warranty against six, in a wooden cabinet. It costs the most and it is the only one here making a serious claim about lasting decades.
- Milling several pounds at a time — the Mockmill 200. The speed is the entire reason to pay the difference. If you are not milling in bulk you are buying minutes you will not miss.
- The NutriMill Harvest is the one that is hardest to make a case for: the shortest warranty of the four, coarser flour by report, and not consistently cheaper than the Mockmill 100. If it is substantially discounted where you shop, it is a perfectly good mill; at parity, it is not the one to choose.
What a mill will not do
Oily seeds. Flax, hemp hearts, sunflower and oily nuts paste the stones and are a serious job to clean off. No stone mill on this page is a nut-butter machine, whatever a product photo implies.
Hulled grain. Einkorn, emmer, spelt and oats arrive wrapped in a husk that a mill will not remove. Buy them already hulled. A mill is not a dehuller.
Damp grain. Moisture gums the stones. Grain has to be properly dry before it goes in.
How this page was made
Specifications here are drawn from manufacturers' published figures and from reviewers who have run these machines — The Fresh Loaf, The Baking Network, True Sourdough and Pleasant Hill Grain's comparison guide, checked in September 2026. Where sources disagreed, the disagreement is on the page rather than resolved silently: the warranty note above exists because two different numbers are both correct about different products.
No mill was supplied to this site, no affiliate arrangement is in place with any manufacturer or retailer named here, and nothing on this page earns anything. If that changes it will be said at the top of the page, not the bottom.
Growing the grain that goes into one is the other half: Growing Your Own Flour.