about me

My name is Michael Albers and I am the sailing miller.

how did all this start? I don´t want to bore you to death so I start a little later in my life story. Borne and raised in a town called Münster in the beautiful state of North Rhine Westphalia I lived a quite normal life. I went to Kindergarten, elementary school and than I got my Abitur which is the highest school degree you can get in Germany. How did I get this? I am still asking myself the same question.

Now, once you are finished with the school in Germany you have to find a job. And this is I guess the most difficult thing to do when you are a young adult and you don´t want to step in to the footsteps of your parents. No offend, but I wanted to do something more special. So I wanted to become a zoo keeper. I always liked animals and I always liked to care about them. The problem was that as a zoo keeper I could not see any bright future. Than I decided to work in an office as an accountant. Still too boring for me and it wasn´t meant to be. What now? My uncle always had great ideas and he has a good friend who was the owner of one of the biggest flour milling groups in North Germany. So I asked the company "Mills United" (still using the united in my companies name) if I could start as a miller apprentice with them. That was the beginning of my career as a miller.

I had to move from my parents home and start my new life as a miller in Recklinghausen. A city in the middle of the biggest industrial zone in Germany. The mill where I started to learn about what a mill is actually doing had at that time a daily milling capacity of 400 tons. Than Mills United expended and we added a new wheat silo and had 30.000 tons of wheat storage and an additional of 400 tons milling capacity. During the start-up of this new mill I got to know two young millers of the company Bühler. We had time during the start-up and they told me about the possibilities a miller has, if he is doing the master in milling at the only milling school which is giving you a state certified milling diploma in mill building and milling technology. The DMSB (German Milling School in Braunschweig) is the place where I had to go to improve my knowledge.