Essay by John Mattingly
Water – January 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
MENTION VODKA, and potatoes and Russians come to mind. As a high school student assigned to read Dostoyevsky, I got in the mood by putting thin-sliced potatoes in an empty pop bottle with a teaspoon of sugar, shaking, then capping with a balloon. The balloon blew up until, in about two weeks, it broke, yielding vodka. Well, sort of. It was a beverage suitable for sipping while reading Crime and Punishment, if you wanted to fast-forward to the punishment. (I don’t recommend this recipe.)
It turns out that the association between vodka, potatoes, and Russians isn’t quite tight. Most drinkable vodka is distilled from grains — barley, rye and corn — while potatoes are used only by impoverished peasants or uninformed high school students, potato vodka being inferior due to bitterness. And Poland claims to be the country of origin for vodka, circa the 1600s, when vodka was developed in Warsaw for use in both medicine and religion. Russia apparently got credit for originating vodka because the Russian word for water is voda. It’s possible that Russian peasants made vodka out of potatoes as a way of killing disease and foul odors in their voda.
I knew none of these vodka facts when I saw Colorado Premium Vodka in my local liquor store; I immediately thought of San Luis Valley potatoes, grown in the region where I farm. The guy behind the counter told me that local spuds were probably in the brew and it was a boost to the local potato economy — compensation for the popularity of low-carb diets that have sliced into potato sales.
NOPE. COLORADO PREMIUM Vodka is made from quality midwestern grains — the very grains, suggests the Colorado Vodka website, that Kathy Lee Bates could see from atop Pikes Peak when she wrote about amber waves of grain. That’s extraordinary eyesight, the caliber you would need to see where Colorado Premium Vodka is actually distilled: San Jose, California, by a company named Colorado Spirits. The only thing Colorado about Colorado Premium Vodka is the voda.
Colorado Premium Vodka originators, Rob and Gail Stephens of Manitou Springs, say that the water comes from a secret source in the mountains, from snow that melted thousands of years ago and bubbles up 8,000 feet to the surface, naturally purified, but still possessed of healthful minerals like calcium and potassium. Come to think of it, I was wondering about my calcium and potassium levels the last time I drank a vodka martini.
The promotional value of Colorado’s water is old news to commercial brewers. Coors became famous for using “pure Rocky Mountain spring water,” which made its image popular in the Midwest and East, despite the ambiguity of whether their spring water flowed from a spring or in the spring.
In fact, according to Citizen Coors by Dan Baum, a complaint was once filed with the Federal Trade Commission charging that Coors didn’t really use “Rocky Mountain Spring Water.”
As Baum points out, after Coors started expanding into new markets, some of its beer was actually “blended,” by combining beer concentrate from Golden with water from its Virginia packaging plant. Thus, federal regulators decided that the company could only apply its Rocky Mountain spring water promotions to beer manufactured and packaged in Golden. Although the Coors packaging plant in Virginia was reputed to have excellent water, it was clear that Virginia water just wasn’t the same as pure Rocky Mountain spring water.
Far more alarming than Coors use of Virginia water, however, was the revelation that the company’s famed Rocky Mountain spring water was polluted. At one point, Coors realized that four of its legendary springs were contaminated by solvents which the company used to clean cans. As Baum reveals:
“As Coors executives admitted almost a decade later, the company decided to keep the contaminations secret. Its water engineers believed the solvents … were so volatile that they would evaporate harmlessly as the engineers pumped out the polluted wells. The engineers quietly began pumping the tainted waters … into a stream called Kinney Run.”
FINALLY, IN 1990, after nine years of concealment, an anonymous caller reported the company’s water problems to the Colorado Health Department, and Coors was subsequently fined for polluting public water supplies.
But despite such embarrassing episodes, the company’s famous Rocky Mountain Spring Water is still prized by Coors corporate executives and beer drinkers alike.
Anheuser-Busch located a brewery in Fort Collins specifically to enhance its image with Rocky Mountain water. I know this from personal experience, as I was on the board of directors of North Poudre Irrigation Company when Busch came to Fort Collins and began talks with ditch companies to get water. At a meeting with the North Poudre board, a Busch negotiator told us the Busch family had a long-standing ambition to place a brewery in an area where they could use pure mountain water.
The water supply the Busch Brewery now uses would not strike most beer drinkers as being particularly picturesque or hygienic, but Busch sales have increased dramatically since making the Colorado water connection.
So Colorado Premium Vodka has a proven promotional plan (claims of pure Colorado water in the brew, with snow-capped mountains on the bottle), but I was skeptical about the voda. It’s possible to keep an artesian well secret from most people, but not from the State Engineer. Thus the closely guarded secret artesian well used in Colorado Premium Vodka would be on record, with a commercial use adjudication, and a determined person should be able to find it.
But then again, the water might be recorded under a different corporate name, so finding it could take weeks. And then I’d have to find out how they get the water to California. . . .
It could be trucked in a 6,000-gallon tanker for about $2 a loaded mile, or $3,000, which is 50ยข a gallon. Freight rates might be higher, especially if special handling costs are associated with spiriting water from a secret source and keeping it clean in transport and later storage, but even if the total cost is $1 a gallon, it’s still cheap compared to vodka at about $80 a gallon. Or even bottled water in a convenience store at around $3 a gallon.
So maybe they really do ship water to their distillery in California (although you’d think that California would have a few natural mountain springs of its own).
Finally, what about Colorado Premium Vodka’s claim that their closely guarded artesian water is from snow that melted thousands of years ago. There are techniques for time-dating water. All the water on Earth has been here since planet formation — Earth has not gained or lost water to the universe — but there are ways of determining when a particular parcel of water last precipitated in the hydrologic cycle.
For instance, water that precipitated after about 1946 will contain certain radioactive isotopes, such as Strontium 90 and Iodine 131, from atmospheric nuclear testing. Other known time proxy markers come from past volcanic activity, meteor hits, remains of fossil-dated aquatic organisms, and oxygen isotopes. Water from snow that melted thousands of years ago will have markers that reasonably calibrate its last precipitation cycle. Water that has been out of circulation for several millennia has a better chance of being pure than water that’s been sloshing through a polluted atmosphere every year (though this is not automatically fact, as some groundwater comes in contact with toxic or disagreeable substances like acid mine drainage or sulfur). Colorado Premium Vodka does not provide any details as to the dating proxies used to support their claim of old water.
FRESH WATER IS SCARCE ON Earth, being only about 3% of all water, and most of that is in polar ice caps, leaving a rare remainder in streams and groundwater. Pure, fresh water is even rarer.
We who live here, in the Rocky Mountains, know that our water can get dirty, contaminated, or muddy. And some sources are over-mineralized, smelly and foul-tasting naturally.
But the promotional value of Colorado water in vodka is a reminder that the real premium — not just in the West, but nationwide — is water from the headwaters, water that brings to mind wilderness streams and mountain heights which are far beyond the reaches of traffic and industry.
John Mattingly farms and writes between Villa Grove and Moffat.
