Austin tank town

More partners means less environmental impact. Our Southeast partner based in Mississippi is one of the oldest family owned breweries in the region.

We catch and bottle rainwater at their facilities. Based in Atlanta, our newest partner Monday Night Brewing, is set to help us serve the east coast with fresh Georgia rain.

If you have questions about your subscription or order contact us at: rainwaterdirect richardsrainwater. Meet Richard Heinichen The man who started everything. Cloud to bottle since Richard catches his first drop Tired of well water that produced dirty dishes, dry hair, and cardboard-stiff jeans, Richard installed a rain collection system. Developing sparkling rainwater Since rainwater is free of minerals and additives, carbonation was a challenge.

Rain is local, everywhere. Share the Crush! Feel The Power Driving Tanks! We have plenty of bumps, dips and humps and if it's rained recently Plus, you can take along 3 passengers for the Tank ride at no extra charge! Includes the same driver and an extra 3 passengers as well 6 passengers total. Have a group of 5 or more driving participants? We'll get you up in our massive 40, pound construction excavator, and for at least 15 minutes you can feel like a true heavy equipment operator!

Don't be intimidated by the size as our trained instructors will have you running the machine like a pro in no time. Dig a huge hole and fill it back in Rather than buy regular bottled water, he drove an hour home to refill from his own cictern.

He relies on word of mouth. Also, he started small, convincing friends who run the Austin Zoo and a nearby barbecue joint to carry his water. As word spread, two local supermarket chains picked it up. But having their name attached to the project helped us get the approval we needed from state and federal angecies. Heinichen hopes to eventually franchise the rainwater-bottling concept, which he says can be financially viable in any area that gets at least 32 inches of rainfall annually.

Today, he produces about 5, bottles a week. Unlike his competitors, Heinichen forgoes chlorine and other chemicals during his water-purification process. Filters remove pollen, dust, and other particles, while UV lights and reverse-osmosis membranes take care of bacteria.

The resulting product, he says, is purer that the big-name brands, which often fail to completely remove harmful substances. And soon the whole country may get a taste; Heinichen is in negotiations with a major department store to provide bottled water for its locations nationwide order your own at rainwater. The biggest challenge has been convincing people that water from the sky can be a clean, safe beverage. Who among us has not stood in a soft rain shower with mouth wide open to try to catch some liquid sky?

Heinichen is believed to be the only person in the United States bottling rainwater for commercial sale. Heinichen whose name is pronounced like beer, not water is the uncrowned Purveyor of Precipitation. His is a puddle-wonderful world where every drop of rain is captured before it hits the ground and is then used for washing clothes, cooking, bathing, gardening, and of course, drinking.

Well…not every drop of rain. Heinichen has so much rainwater saved to bottle that he had to watch more than , gallons wash across the highway in front of his bottling plant during the recent floods, according to a formula that uses collection surface and inches of rain to calculate gallons. He has , gallons of stored rainwater just ready to turn into bottled water, which he began selling 10 months ago.

Heinichen hoards his rainwater in plain view. If you are driving on U. Some of the tanks are 15 feet high and hold 17, gallons. Near the tanks are six arched tin roofs with 20, square feet of surface to capture rain. A field of lavendar and rosemary perfumes the air. Twist open a bottle of the straightforwardly named Rain Water. Pure rainwater is odorless, colorless and tasteless. The tactile response is the kicker.

Rain Water feels like what dew looks like. It is so soft and weightless the cloud it came from must have had a satin lining. Rick Perry and his family get regular deliveries from Tank Town.

The water often sells out. Water snobbery is commonplace in the growing world of rainwater collection. Hundreds of homeowners in the Hill Country, where well water can be corrosive and unavailable during droughts, have converted to whole-house rainwater systems for everything from showers to drinking water. Heinichen and his wife, Suzy Banks, a freelance writer for Texas Monthly and other publications, drilled a well for their home near Dripping Springs in early The water was so hard it turned freshly laundered clothes into stiff boards, turned their hair into Brillo pads and corroded pipes.

They converted the house to a rainwater system; they converted themselves into rain collection experts. By the end of that year, Heinichen was selling fiberglass rainwater tanks and the odd hamlet called Tank Town was born. The idea for selling bottled water came on a hot summer day in when Heinichen got thirsty while installing a residential rainwater system for a customer.

He reached for a bottle filled with rainwater from his kitchen tap at home, but it was empty. Instead of going to nearby stores and paying 69 cents for a bottle of water, Heinichen drove 20 miles back to his house to wet his whistle. On the way, he had a pipe dream: Why not bottle rainwater commercially so others could share something so sublime it inspired a parched man to take a mile detour?

I put a spigot on a cloud instead of a pump in the ground. It took four years of tinkering and government bureaucracy — water torture for Heinichen — before he won approval to sell rainwater.

Texas health officials had never given permission for bottling and sales of rainwater.