Meet a Flour Mill at Mühlerama

4 Jun 2023 by Amby

$16

Zurich

Switzerland location-icon

Mühlerama

The Zurich Mühlerama is a still-working 19th-century flour mill, now converted to a museum.

Exhibits offer an interactive look into the workings of a flour mill, chock-full of information and hands-on activities to get visitors thinking about where bread comes from.

Miller time.

Entrance:

Tickets are 15CHF for adults, I got in for ‘free’ because I had the Swiss museum pass (177CHF/year).

Mühlerama also offers bread and pasta-making workshops, which run about 3-5 hours long and cost 155 CHF.

The surrounding buildings make for a really interesting complex with cafes, a theatre, and other cultural activity areas—this area would be worth checking out even if there wasn’t a mill museum.

Enter at your own whisk.

We got adorable audio guides imbedded in a brush used for sweeping up flour. You are supposed to tap the device on spots indicated throughout the museum to get information about an exhibit.

The audio is told from the perspective of the flour mill “herself.”

Black dots mark the spot.

Unfortunately for me two of my audio guides ran out of battery so I couldn’t make full use of them. After the second one stopped working I didn’t feel like going all the way down stairs and getting another one.

Sev’s worked the whole time though.

The museum also has free tours and we were lucky one was starting right when we got there around 3pm on a Sunday.

Where the grain's journey (and the tour) begins.

The museum employee said it was in German but the guide invited us on the tour anyway and translated for me.

The guide turned on the big mill machine and put a bunch of grain in. We then followed the different stages of grain processing up the stairs into different rooms.

It was cool to see the grain being change into flour, and the museum sells the flour it mills in its gift shop. Sev quite enjoyed the mechanics of the mill, and I learned a thing or two.

The end-process. The guide shows us how grain materials are sorted by size.

The rest of the museum goes through the mill and discusses the mill’s history and mill work culture over the years.

Mills were considered to be haunted in the olden days!

Interspersed with exhibits are tables filled with bread creations, likely from the workshops Mühlerama runs.

These are all extremely old and stale.

There are even some interactive exhibits. At one, we could put a bread crumb under a microscope, take a picture, and then print it out. I look forward to hanging mine up!