long-forgotten varieties of corn
and wheat. There’s a makeshift
area for baking classes, and a tiny
retail space offers brown paper
sacks of whole grains for sale. In
the middle of it all, sporting a big,
bushy beard and brown Carhartt
overalls like an organic farming
Santa Claus, is owner and miller
James Brown.
“Miller” is an inadequate de-
scription of Brown’s role. After
retiring from a three-decade ca-
reer in church music, including
fifteen years at Austin’s First
Presbyterian, he’s now orches-
trating a statewide renaissance
of artisanal and ancient grains.
Although Brown focused most of
his professional life on music, he
is no stranger to the food world; he
has a culinary degree, has worked
in restaurants, and is a passion-
ate baker. “I got into this because
I wanted a better loaf of bread—it’s
just a stupid extreme to go to,” he
says, laughing. “I inadvertently
became an activist for the farmer.”
To make better bread you need
better flour. And to make bet-
ter flour you need better grains.Brown started Barton Springs
Mill because he couldn’t find high-
quality flour for his baking needs,
and after asking local chefs and
bakers, he found he wasn’t alone—
and that grains were at the heart
of the problem. Grain requires
hefty infrastructure to get from
farm to oven, including facilities
for small-scale cleaning, hulling,
and stone-milling. Such opera-
tions were once commonplace,
but as industrial farming prolif-
erated in the twentieth century,
they largely disappeared. Without
mills to process their crops, small
Texas farmers had little incentive
to grow grain.
Brown had a hunch that if he
created such a mill, more farm-
ers, responding to the demand for
locally sourced food, would rotate
grain in with their cash crops. And
that gamble seems to have paid off:
in two short years, Barton Springs’
business has exploded. Among the
sixty or so Texas restaurants using
its products are Austin’s Emmer &
Rye, Dallas’s Petra and the Beast,
San Antonio’s Cured, Houston’s
Nancy’s Hustle, and Marfa’s Cochi-neal. Bakeries and distilleries are
also important customers.
Brown “is the real deal,” says
Meaders Ozarow, the founder
of Empire Baking Company, a
wholesale bakery that has be-
come a Dallas institution since it
opened more than 25 years ago.
Ozarow had spent years looking for
the right supplier of locally grown
grain flour that could handle Em-
pire’s volume. The bakery now
produces a Barton Springs Mill
sourdough-type loaf, and Ozarow
hopes to add more varieties. Draw-
ing a comparison to the early days
of the farm-to-table movement,
when chefs and customers started
demanding higher-quality straw-
berries and salad greens, she says,
“We have a phrase at the bakery:
‘We’ve seen this movie before. We
know how it ends.’ James Brown?
People with that kind of intelli-
gence and that kind of business
sense? They work out.”
Brown now serves as match-
maker, distributor, retailer, ana-
lyst, and advocate for Texas’s grain
community. Those tasks require
someone with a knack for com-ABOVE: Bloody
Butcher Red, an
heirloom corn
processed by
Barton Springs
Mill; Brown on
a farm in New
Braunfels.Not just a
swimming
hole, Austin’s
Barton Springs
once turned
the massive
millstones of the
area’s last flour
mill, destroyed
by a fire in 1886.
Barton Springs
Mill is named in
its honor.SPRINGS
ETERNAL32 TEXAS MONTHLY
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