Water!

As if the drought was affecting our beer, we had a water shortage while brewing and I promise it was not because Ben "the hippy" Arrington wanted to save water. It seems that we just didn't start with enough in the beginning. We had planned on finishing with a 5 gallon batch of beer, but we ended up with a little more than 2.5 gallons. Since then we have found a couple sites that help calculate how much watch we should start with and we definitely didn't start with enough. Thanks Mike. While starting with 7 gallons in anticipation of losing some water in the mashing process and boiling off about 1 gallon as we prepared the wort, we did not capture the entire picture. We think we failed to anticipate loosing so much water in the mashing process, where the grain absorbs some water, and just general loss of as the liquid makes it way through the entire process . We didn't realize how much would be left over in a couple of the tanks that we used and we also read that the wort looses some of its volume as it is cooled for fermenting. Next time we will be ready though and hopefully be able to make enough for everyone to enjoy. To better brewing!