In late 2013, I made my first loaf with hard red winter wheat flour from Community Grains. This stuff, which is milled at Certified Foods in Woodland, CA and marketed out of Oakland, is amazing.
I still remember the strength of the wheaty smell after mixing up the dough. It blew typical whole wheat flour out of the water. Some of this difference must owe to its freshness, but apparently some might owe to the milling process. Community Grains mills “true” whole wheat flour—where a bunch of whole wheat berries come in, are ground up, and then you have flour. In contrast, larger mills first split the wheat berry into its parts (bran, endosperm, germ), grind these and then recombine them in various proportion in their flours.
Note: the image accompanying this post was changed after I realized the version first posted on 2017-02-04 mistakenly used a photo of the loaf produced using a long cold proof.
Finished loaf