We've been slowly (understatement) pulling together our plans for a distillery and recently came across a property we are interested in. The county it is located in has asked us to indicate how much water we'll require and what volume of waste we'll produce is. That threw me for a curve.
We are in Ontario and the legal requirement to have on-site sales is a 5000L still, which we'll use for producing low-wines and will also serve as our mash tun. Using brewer's mash water calculator I was able to estimate that we would use about 2500L during the process assuming evaporation and boil off scale proportionally from the 5G guide I used. If the output were 40% ABV, the total waste of water and solids would be 3000L, assuming I didn't try to capture the solids. Then there is obviously some water needed for cleanup, is it safe to think this is under 100 or so litres?
Each distilled batch of low-wine would be obviously have some water waste left behind as well, but that's going to be a couple hundred litres of pretty clean water vs. the 5000L still output.
Do those numbers seems reasonable at all? I'm trying to come up with a worse-case scenario since I think this is more about determining if the township can handle the requirements more than the facility. Am I completely off base?