A river runs beneath you, unseen and quiet. It begins simply enough as rain falling from the clouds—perhaps a product of a cold front slicing into warm, moist air. Most of it eventually makes its way into the Ohio River or its tributaries. But not all.
Along Ohio’s western spine, the new meets the old as fresh rainwater seeps into the soil and begins its journey through eons of sand, gravel, limestone, and silt before settling into the natural underground wonderland known as the Great Miami Buried Valley Aquifer. And in Hamilton, they lovingly quench their thirst, proudly proclaiming it “the best water in the world.”
While flavor (or lack of it) is in the taste buds of the beholder, for at least a few businesses it’s an important reason they call Butler County their home. The waters that make up the aquifer are remarkably pure, filtered by up to 250 feet of permeable sediment left behind by glaciers that, three times over the last few million years, covered and retreated from the Miami River Valley.
“The valley was filled with what’s known as glacial outflow, and it was left from the Wisconsin Glacial Stage which retreated from this area around 24,000 years ago,” says Jonathan Levy, a Miami University associate professor of geology. The glaciers, he notes, retreated and advanced several times before the Ice Age ended—but retreating, he says, just meant the bottom of the glacier was melting faster than the ice was moving.
The material the melting ice deposited became the super-filter that created the aquifer, one of the largest in the U.S. And, because it’s made of porous material, it’s like a giant sponge drenched with water. An estimated 1.5 trillion gallons are stored there, constantly replenished by the Great Miami River, its tributaries, and around 40 inches of rain and snow that fall each year.
Like Levy, Tim McLelland doesn’t lose sleep worrying about Butler County’s water supply drying up. Quality, yes. Quantity, no. McLelland manages the Groundwater Consortium of area cities, water companies, and businesses. Since 1991, the group has pooled resources to monitor the aquifer and protect it from contamination. McClelland, who counts consumer education as an important role the consortium plays, has led the group for nearly 25 years.
The aquifer originates in Indian Lake halfway between Bellefontaine and Wapakoneta. That’s where the Great Miami River emerges from the southern end of the Logan County reservoir and begins its 160-mile journey south to the Ohio River. The aquifer runs underneath and two to three miles on either side of the river and, according to the Miami Conservancy District, provides drinking water for 2.3 million people in southwest Ohio. While most of the customers are further north, Levy notes, 12 percent of Cincinnati’s water is supplied by the aquifer. (The remaining drinking water is pulled from the Ohio River.)
“Developers come to me all the time and ask Where does it end? when they’re trying to deal with building foundations on a pile of sand,” McClelland says, laughing. “I tell them it doesn’t.”
The area’s water quality helped attract the MolsonCoors brewery to northern Butler County, where it employs nearly 500 workers and produces more than 10 million barrels a year of Miller Lite, Coors Light, Miller High Life, and a dozen or so other beer brands. The Trenton brewery also produces all of the company’s canned aquifer water, which is distributed as aid to communities suffering from emergencies or natural disasters.
The water attracts small brewers, too. “We are one of the few breweries in this area that doesn’t treat our water at all with any extra minerals,” says Jim Goodman, co-founder of Hamilton’s Municipal Brew Works, who explains he simply filters out the fluoride and chlorine that the municipal water company puts in. “We don’t have to. It’s that good. I like to refer to it as the Goldilocks of water—not too hard, not too soft. So it works with all styles of beer.”
Goodman is fresh off a big win for Municipal with its scotch ale, Guthrie, taking a gold medal at the U.S. Open Beer Championships. He’s also busy preparing to brew a special blueberry hefeweizen in collaboration with five other breweries. Goodman says he likes to experiment, but not with the water. He talks about all the variables that can make or break a beer. Was the barley roasted properly? Is the malt too sugary? Were the hops picked too early? Was it a wet summer or was it too dry? “But we never worry about the water,” he says. “It’s consistently good, which is why we always test it but never treat it.”
Municipal brews about 1,000 barrels of beer a year, which translates to approximately 31,000 gallons of water used. Contrast that to MolsonCoors, which its website says produces 10.4 million barrels of beer a year out of the Trenton plant. That translates to approximately 322 million gallons of aquifer water annually, making it the aquifer’s biggest commercial customer. The company maintains three private wells on its property.
Like all the wells that serve Hamilton, Fairfield, Dayton, and surrounding communities, the MolsonCoors water portals are dependable workhorses, McLelland notes. Even when a severe drought hit the region in 2007, the aquifer level registered only about a three-foot drop from its typical 250-foot depth.
Protecting the quality of the aquifer means McLelland relies a lot on cooperation from business, industry, and government. He achieves results primarily by persuasion since laws a regulations designed to protect the water quality appear to be as porous as the soil.
In late August, McLelland participated in a table-top emergency response exercise with the Mid-Valley Oil Pipeline Company. The Texas firm owns an oil pipeline that crosses Seven Mile Creek near its confluence with the Great Miami River. Its 20-inch main, carrying 10,000 barrels of pumped crude, had recently popped out of the riverbed and been struck by a falling tree. Fortunately, the pipe held.
“If it hadn’t, that oil would have been in the Great Miami within two hours,” McLelland says, noting that the incident happened around the time of the East Palestine train disaster. The city of Hamilton’s prized drinking water would have been the spill’s first victim.
“It would have been a long-term and expensive cleanup but, even more difficult, especially after East Palestine, it would have been difficult convincing our customers that the water’s safe to drink. That would been a question on their minds forever.”
Mid-Valley reburied the pipeline, although McLelland ruefully noted that executives said they weren’t required by law to do so. He credits the company with practicing good corporate stewardship and says the tabletop emergency exercise simulating an even worse calamity will make future emergency responses more effective.
While the ecosystem was untouched by the oil pipeline, there are sections of the aquifer that remain isolated because, in the past, they were contaminated. Probably the most recognizable of these was the Fernald Materials Processing Center, which from 1951 to 1989 processed uranium for the U.S. defense industry on the Hamilton/Butler county line. The Superfund site has largely been restored—it’s now a nature preserve—but pumps continue to extract uranium from several remediation wells located around the property.
Similarly, the groundwater lying below the infamous Chem-Dyne property near downtown Hamilton, another nationally known Superfund site, is polluted with chemicals, pesticides, PCBs, and waste oil. “It’s probably contaminated forever, and we’ll likely never be able to use that part of the aquifer again,” says McLelland. Like the Fernald groundwater, it’s been isolated from the rest of aquifer and water is pumped out, treated with a variety of technologies and natural processes, and returned.
Other threats to the aquifer include pesticide and fertilizer runoff, leaking oil and gas tanks, contaminated runoff from urban streetscapes, and perfluoroalkyls, commonly known as PFASs (or “forever chemicals”). Most of those, McLelland notes, leach from landfills. It’s not a serious problem in the aquifer yet, he says, but he’s watching it closely along with the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.
“The biggest threat from PFAS or any other contamination comes in the more shallow parts of the aquifer where there’s less an opportunity for dilution,” McLelland says, noting that the forever chemicals are everywhere. “It’s in our wax paper, our pizza boxes, our popcorn bags, and it’s going to be very expensive to deal with.”
Potential challenges aside, Hamilton knows what it has. The city bottles the “best tasting water in the world” in stout blue plastic bottles and sells it on the retail market. It’s right out of the tap, and they’re not afraid to say so. On the back of the bottle, the label proudly proclaims the beverage’s source water is the Great Miami Buried Valley Aquifer, while its front label blandly describes it as coming “from a municipal source.” When you want to refill it, the city brags, just turn on your kitchen faucet. After all, the product is called Hamilton on Tap.
“I came here from Minneapolis, where they’re very proud of their water quality, but I remember telling my boys when we moved here that we didn’t need to buy bottled water any longer,” says Jody Gunderson, Hamilton’s economic development director. “The stuff coming out of the tap? It’s better.”
Gunderson, who has entertained some brushing inquiries from the nation’s big water bottlers—he wouldn’t specify which ones—says Hamilton’s electric, gas, and water utilities are big selling points for bringing new business to the city. “I always emphasize our water quality with every proposal, whether they ask for it or not. It’s a unique selling point, and it could be a tiebreaker.”
The region’s water quality is widely known to prospective customers, he says, and he predicts they’ll continue to receive inquiries going forward. He just landed the city’s first data center—a $15-million investment set to open next year—and notes that it’s a water-intensive industry. A flavoring company in the city’s industrial park is also water-dependent.
“Going forward, I’m able to be a little more judicious in the kinds of companies we seek because they really want to be consumers of our utilities,” Gunderson says. “It’s a good place to be.”
A couple of blocks from Gunderson’s municipal building office, two former Procter & Gamble entrepreneurs saw an opportunity and took it. Ice Mountain, Desani, or Aquafina may not call Hamilton home, but Pahhani Premium Alkaline water does.
Co-owners Satinder Bharaj and Erik Loomis watch as their dispenser pumps out 100 bottles of water a minute, twice a week, directly from the city’s water system. They produce around 14,000 bottles a week, which they sell mostly in convenience stores, natural food groceries, and health clubs.
“We start with this water, which has been recognized as the best in the world,” says Bharaj, who has a Ph.D. in pharmaceutical science and undergraduate degrees in biology and chemistry. “That’s not puffery. It’s a two-time gold medal winner at Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting Competition, the Olympic Games of water.”
Loomis, with degrees in environmental science and business administration, says the key to Pahhani water is its alkalinity—a pH greater than 8 that comes courtesy of the aquifer’s limestone-based natural filter. “We pride ourselves in being a single source,” he says, “and we use a natural process versus the artificial processes that other bottled waters use.”
It’s not to say Pahhani doesn’t treat the water that comes out of the tap. The company has a proprietary process, Loomis says, that perpetuates a taste difference that, he laughs, “has water snobs coming up to us and saying they won’t go back to their old water.” Their process, he says, also slightly increases the water’s alkalinity, improving its absorption into the body.
The city of Hamilton treats its water, too, with a mixture of chlorine gas and sodium chlorite to chemically create chlorine dioxide. It’s a unique and complex process designed to eliminate chlorine smell and taste. It’s all done on site because chlorine dioxide can’t be transported on public roads.
The result is a hard water filtered by sediments dropped before dinosaurs roamed Earth, uniquely treated (and sometimes untreated if you’re a craft brewer), bottled in sturdy plastic blue bottles, commercialized by businesses large and small, and celebrated by water connoisseurs for its hydrating qualities and feel on the tongue and palate. It’s the foundation for hundreds of jobs and a clear marketing advantage for Hamilton, Fairfield, and the other communities that draw Heaven’s liquid from the river beneath.