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About the mill
Nell bought a granary that had been empty eleven years.
Kestrel Granary has been milling on Dike Road since 2014. Two people run it, three on a delivery day, and everything it grinds was grown inside a twenty-two mile ring around the building.
How it started
Nell Ostrander grew up on a seed farm outside Bow and spent nine years as a production baker in Seattle, buying flour by the pallet from a distributor who could never tell her where any of it was grown. In 2013 she came home to look at a granary on Dike Road that had sat empty since the previous owner stopped cleaning seed in 2002. It had a sound roof, a working leg, a concrete floor and about four inches of pigeon mess.
She bought it in January 2014, spent nine months on the roof and the wiring, and put in a forty-inch Austrian granite pair that October. The first sack of Edison went out to a bakery in Fairhaven the week before Thanksgiving.
Wes Boonstra came on as head miller in 2017. He had been running a feed mill in Lynden and knew more about bearings, belts and dust than anyone Nell had met. He dresses the stones by hand, keeps the Clipper alive, and does the test bake on every new lot.
What we will not do
We would rather tell you a variety has run out than send you something close to it. Nell Ostrander, owner
We do not blend to hit a number, we do not buy grain from outside the valley to cover a gap, and we do not bleach, bromate or add anything at all. The bran and the germ stay in unless you have asked for sifted flour, in which case they come out over a sieve and we tell you the extraction rate. There is no house blend, because a house blend is mostly a way to hide what a bad year did to the wheat.
A short chronology
Twelve years on Dike Road
| 2014 | Nell buys the granary in January. Roof, wiring, floor. The granite pair goes in that October and the first sack of Edison leaves in November. |
|---|---|
| 2015 | The 1954 Clipper No. 27 comes off a farm sale near Bow for four hundred dollars and a day of loading. Cleaning work starts almost immediately. |
| 2017 | Wes Boonstra joins as head miller. The Bellingham run starts with three stops and a borrowed van. |
| 2019 | The mill store opens in the old office, Thursday to Saturday. Rye is ground Thursday mornings from this point on. |
| 2021 | First contracted acres: emmer and triticale on the Dykstra place off Beaver Marsh Road, grown to our order rather than bought on the open market. |
| 2023 | The Seattle run starts, Wednesdays, Ballard and Fremont only. A gravity table is added next to the Clipper. |
| 2026 | Four farms, six grains, three routes, two people and one pair of stones. |
Reviews
What the people who buy it say
MargueriteBakery owner, BellinghamThree deliveries running, the Edison red came in at the same protein. That matters more to me than anything else printed on the tag.
TomasPizzeria, BallardWe moved our 48-hour dough over to the Yecora last spring. It drinks more water than I expected and it browns faster, so we took the deck oven down fifteen degrees. Nell talked me through it on the phone before we wasted a batch.
PriyaHome baker, AnacortesI drive up on Saturdays for the rye. It is ground that morning and you can smell the difference in the car on the way home.
DaleGrower, BowThey cleaned twelve tons of triticale for us in November and had it back on our truck the same week, in the middle of their own harvest.
Kestrel Granary is a fictional business built to demonstrate a Kolbrant site. These quotes are written examples, not real reviews, and there is no review profile behind them.
The growers
Four farms, one valley
Every grain we sell is named to a field. If you ask where a sack came from, we can tell you the farm, the block and the week it was cut.
| Farm | Where | What they grow for us |
|---|---|---|
| Halverson | Fir Island | Edison hard red spring, and a block of Yecora Rojo on the light ground |
| Dykstra | Beaver Marsh Road | Emmer and triticale, both on contract since 2021 |
| Sundstrom | Bow | Winter rye and buckwheat, rotated behind potatoes |
| The mill's own | Dike Road | Forty acres of Edison, mostly so we can afford to get one crop wrong |
Wholesale · store · custom milling
Call the mill and ask what is in the bin.
Nell or Wes picks up between 7:30 and 3:30 on weekdays. If we are on the floor and the stones are loud, leave a message with the variety and the poundage and you will hear back the same day.