My guest tonight is Andrew Heyn. For the past 17 years Andrew and his wife Blair have owned and operated Elmore Mountain Bread, a wood fired micro-bakery outside of Elmore, Vermont. They specialize in naturally leavened breads made with flour ground in stone mills designed and built by Andrew himself. After word got out, Andrew’s mills quickly became sought after, and since 2015, their company New American Stone Mills has been building mills and shipping them around the country and world.
On this episode of the Sourdough Podcast, Andrew Heyn of Elmore Mountain Bread and New American Stone Mills joins me to talk about his unexpected journey into artisan bread baking. We discuss how his passion for fresh milled wheat led him to build his own stone mill and eventually mills for customers around the world. And we talk about how his pursuit of better bread has helped support the growth and development his own burgeoning Vermont grain economy and has inspired others around the country.
“We opened those bags of fresh flour, it was like ‘holy smokes!’ We’d never experienced something like this before. We had always just had white flour that was all about function and performance and not so much about aroma and flavor. And so we said, ‘we’ve got to do this, this is like nothing we’ve ever experienced before.’ So that was the impetus.”