Brooklyn Granary & Mill brings a gristmill to Gowanus

Back in 1810, the Gravesend Village in what is now Bath Beach contained 20 houses, a church, a schoolhouse, and two mills, none of which exists anymore. Grain milling in Brooklyn feels about as antiquated as the borough’s original name — “Breuckelen.” And yet, baker Patrick Shaw-Kitch is building a brand new gristmill in Gowanus. 

The Brooklyn Granary & Mill (BGM), set at 300 Huntington Street, will feature stone mills. Shaw-Kitch isn’t using contemporary mills or even the fast, modern steel roller mills introduced in the late 1800s. No, instead he is using modernized stone mills — two pieces of stone stacked atop each other and rotated slowly to grind flour, the best of 15th-century technology — to produce flour. The mill will include a bakery showcasing the best of the BGM flour. 

Brooklynites love it. BGM raised over $50,000 on Kickstarter. 

But why is Patrick Shaw-Kitch preparing to open a brand-new stone mill in Gowanus? In short, nutrition, sustainability and above all, flavor. 

Before starting BGM, Shaw-Kitch was the head baker at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a two-Michelin-starred farm-to-table restaurant in Tarrytown. “There was a flour mill there, so all of the flour that we used in the bakery we milled ourselves and bought directly from the farmers,” Shaw-Kitch told the Brooklyn Eagle. Stone milling retains all parts of a wheat berry — the germ, the bran and the endosperm — whereas store-bought flour usually contains only endosperm. Blue Hill’s fresh-milled flour resulted in loaves of bread that diners raved about.