8) J, you can reduce your costs a bit if you use feed corn in the mash. once you are done with the mash, dry it and sell it to the local ranchers as feed stock. it is better for teh animals because they can digest it better than the raw feed corn. understand though that you will get more than twice the yield from sugar, but you will pay more in the end.
one thing you might look into is, is the megasquirt capable of using a knock sensor. if so then you can still run 87 octane, but you will lose performance when you do.