Purely by accident while I was checking similar recipes to see the proportion of honey to flour, I think I ran across your specific recipe. It describes the loaf as dense, which matches your description. So I doubt you did anything wrong, its not supposed to rise very much, is my guess.

Whole wheat flour isn't going to produce as much gluten as regular flour, so you shouldn't expect it to rise as much as say, sandwich bread (the bran shards cut gluten strands). The more whole wheat flour, the less the rise will be, in general.

OK, I ran the baker's percentages on these ratios (grain cereal doesn't count as "flour"). The salt percentage was a little high (3% versus a norm of 2%) so I might reduce the amount of salt to 1 1/2 teaspoons next time, and the grain cereal probably weighed down the dough, but nothing can help that

Couple more ?s. Did you temp the warm water w/a thermometer? Any chance it was over 120 degrees? Can you give me the measurements of each kind of flour, salt, yeast and honey? I want to calculate the baker's percentages to see if there was too much salt or honey (both in excess can inhibit rise).

My first thought is that the yeast and salt came into contact with each other too soon, and that's why the loaf didn't rise (salt, especially with a recipe containing too much salt, retards the activity of yeast, and can even kill it) but there are other possible explanations.

I can probably help you figure out what the problem was, but I'll need more info. Was the 7 grain recipe you used a bread machine recipe or something you hoped to adapt? What order did you put them in the machine? What make and model machine do you have (or if you don't know, is it a 3 lb capacity)?

Yes, the dogs apparently found it so. We had no idea. (The sugar content comes courtesy of rye grains, its not added sugar in the bread recipe.)

My family's dogs were unusually fond of rye bread, which was a bit of a mystery until I found out that it has an unusually high sugar content. LOL - mystery solved!