Native Waters of the Golden West

You’ve got your French mineral water, your Italian mineral water, your Welsh mineral water. You’ve even got your Canadian water--lots of it--which boasts that it’s non- mineral water.

But what of Southern California? Living in an arid climate, we’re naturally obsessed with water, so we’ve long had our own sources.

Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water, like most of the famous European bottled waters, was originally associated with a health spa. During the 19th Century, it was available only at Arrowhead Sanitarium and Hot Springs itself, but the spa began bottling the water in the 1880s in response to popular demand. There was a second Arrowhead bottling plant by 1909.

Puritas, now a second line of Arrowhead, was originally a distilled water made for an ice company, but it has been bottled for drinking purposes since 1894. It merged with Arrowhead in 1929.

Before the aqueducts from the Owens and Colorado Rivers, Southern California relied on wells for its water. Some of our tap water still comes from local aquifers, the proportion used by municipal water departments ranging from 15% in Los Angeles to 80% in Long Beach.

Sparkletts Drinking Water, organized in 1923 as Sparkling Artesian Water Co., has always been a purified well water, from the beginning when it relied on its wells in Eagle Rock. After being bought by Foremost Dairies in 1964, it became largest water bottler in the country and now uses many water sources. It’s now owned by McKesson.

The Big Two, Arrowhead and Sparkletts, are Southern California’s biggest water delivery companies. (For that matter, each sells about 10% of the bottled water in the country.) There are a number of other bottled-water delivery services around the Southland, however, such as Yosemit, Palomar and Ramona.

Two are out-of-state companies: Mountain Valley, from a spring in Arkansas, and Hinckley & Schmitt, which began selling water in 19th Century Chicago, where the local tap water was contaminated by typhus. (Hinckley & Schmitt owns a Southland brand, Deep Rock Water, which has been bottled from Los Angeles artesian wells since 1929.)

San Diego, which depends entirely on the Colorado River for its tap water, has long-established bottled water brands of its own, such as Sun, Pure-Flo and the 60-year-old Knoxage. Alta Dena, the unpasteurized dairy company, sells drinking water in San Diego County.

Several companies get their water from Mt. Palomar in San Diego County, including Palomar, Ramona and Horizon. Orange County has brands of its own, such as Bastanchury, and Ventura County has some of the most charmingly named waters: Mountain Sweet, Matilija, Limpid.

You can also find Northern California water in some of our stores.

Calistoga Water comes from a geyser, as its label illustrates. Calistoga Hot Springs, organized in 1869, was one of the first commercially developed spas in California, the work of the colorful California pioneer Sam Brannan, who was already famous for publicizing the discovery of gold in 1848 and having maintained a private army known as the Avenging Angels. The waters have been bottled since 1924. Perrier has owned it since 1983.

Alhambra, a San Francisco brand of bottled water dating from the earthquake of 1906, is now owned by McKesson.

Mendocino Water, bottled in 1880s, was revived as a brand in the 1980s.