Your first loaf with this flour will be worse than your last one with the supermarket's.

Fresh flour drinks more water — Five to ten per cent more, and sometimes more than that on the wholemeal. A recipe written for supermarket flour gives you a stiff dough and a tight loaf the first time you use this
Add water, not time — Start with five per cent more and go from there. Write down what you settled on — the next bag of the same flour behaves the same way and you will never work it out twice
It carries on changing for a few weeks — Flour matures. Straight off the stones it's at its thirstiest; by week three it has settled down. Neither state is wrong and both make good bread
Wholemeal is a different job, not a harder one — Bran cuts through gluten, so it wants a wetter dough and a shorter final prove. Half wholemeal and half white is where most people should start rather than going straight in
Don't judge it on a rushed loaf — A cold kitchen and a hurried prove will beat any flour. Give the first bag one unhurried weekend before deciding anything
We'd rather say this than have you blame the flour — The commonest reason somebody buys from a mill once and never again is a first loaf that nobody warned them about. That's our failure, not theirs

Protein, as a percentage — Roughly how much gluten you can develop. Eleven to twelve is a good all-rounder, thirteen and up suits long ferments and high hydration, under ten is for cake and pastry and is worse at bread on purpose
Extraction rate — How much of the grain is still in the bag. A hundred per cent is wholemeal; eighty-five is a light brown; seventy-five is a white flour with some of the germ left in
The variety, by name — Because varieties bake differently and a baker who has got on with one will want it again. "Wheat" is not an answer to this question
The harvest year — It's one year's crop. A wet August gives lower protein and everybody in this trade knows it — printing it is the only honest option available
Ash content, if you want it — The mineral measure, and the one continental recipes are written around. We'll give it on request rather than putting a fifth number on a small bag
What no number can tell you — How it behaves in your kitchen, at your temperature, with your starter. The numbers narrow it considerably and they don't decide it

Stones crush the grain, rollers shear it apart — That's the whole mechanical difference and everything else follows from it. Neither is a moral position
Stoneground keeps the germ in — Which is where most of the flavour and all of the oil lives — and it is exactly why stoneground flour goes off and industrial white essentially doesn't
That trade is real and it goes both ways — Six weeks at its best, three months perfectly usable, and after that it isn't bad, it's dull. Buy little and often, or keep it in the freezer
Roller-milled white is a genuinely good product — Consistent, long-lived and cheap, and it is what most bread in the world is made from. If consistency matters more than flavour to you, it's the right answer
Sifting is how white comes off a stone mill — The whole grain goes through and the bran is taken back out. That's why our white is 75% rather than the 72% you'd get industrially, and why it isn't quite as white
"Artisan" means nothing at all — It's not a defined term and anybody may print it. Protein, extraction, variety and harvest are the four words on a bag that carry information

A changeover is a fortnight of adjusting — Protein moves, absorption moves, and a bakery's recipe moves with it. It's the price of a single-origin flour and it is not a fault
Trade customers hear first, in writing — With the new numbers next to the old ones. Finding out from a bad batch of dough on a Tuesday is the thing that loses a wholesale customer for good
Nothing is blended to hide it — Some mills blend across harvests so the flour never changes. That is a legitimate and skilful thing to do, and it isn't ours — ours changes and we tell you exactly how