Granary flour - any alternatives?

My mum owns a bakery and we used to buy our 'Granary' flour direct from Rank-Hovis, until they stopped supplying us because we were too small. We now buy Allied's (I think, could be some other miller) 'Harvester' flour from another supplier. It's almost exactly the same although we do find it a bit less malty (but oddly it has a bit more of a burnt sugar taste ... possibly cheap malt) which means it needs a little longer for proving, although I'd imagine that difference is probably negligable in a breadmaker.

So yes, anything that says 'Harvester' or just has malt and grains in it is more or less the same as 'Granary'. Most granary flour that you can buy in the shops has no real wholemeal in it though, the colour comes from the powdered malt extract that they add to the white flour. That's what gives it the distinctive brown colour and sweetish taste.

We've never had real wholemeal (with bits of meal in it) granary flour,even when we bought it from Rank-Hovis. It was always a fine flour that was light brownish in colour and had nothing in it but the grains. Good granary flour might be made from brown flour with the meal extracted but the vast majority that's available now is simply made from white flour with malt extracts. In fact, I'm not sure that it ever was a 'wholemeal' based flour ... from what I remember the Reps telling us granary is simply a development of white bread - it's a little healthier because it has the whole grains in it but that was balanced with the malt to make it sweeter and more palatable, and more appealing to a wider market. It has a reputation for being healthier because people think it's 'brown', but in fact it's just sweeter white bread lol. You could mix granary flour 1/2 and 1/2 with wholemeal flour though, that would probably be really nice if you like a 'rough' bread.

The only places I've found really, really good flour available in domestic quantities is direct from small mills, although it's difficult to find granary flour as a lot of places don't want to be dealing with all of the stuff you have to add to make 'granary' (there's also the problem of the trade name, you can't call it granary unless you're Rank-Hovis). It's worth asking around locally though. There's a really good index in the back of a book called 'Country Bread' by Linda Collister and Anthony Blake, which lists the names of various suppliers across the UK. It's a lovely book too, lots of great recipes and pictures and a fantastic section on sourdoughs.

Doves Farm do Organic Malthouse Flour - Available in some healthfood shops, Tesco, Sainsburys etc.
Allinsons do a Harvester flour which is granary style, available from the same sources