Articles

Saveur

Rain, Rain, Come My Way
Saveur – April 2004
By: Margo True

In the lush, green country outside Dripping Springs, near Austin in central Texas, lives a man who loves to catch rainwater. Six years ago, Richard Heinichen, a metal sculptor, and his wife, writer Suzy Banks, fed up with drinking from their well – which yielded, as Heinichen puts it, “rock-hard sulfur water which turned our hair into fright wigs and our blue jeans into cardboard” – decided to harvest the sky. Heinichen perfected a tank-and-pump-and-filter system and now drinks water that, as he proudly points out, “has never hit the ground” – and that exceeds the EPA’s water-purity standard. He uses the water for everything and says his clothes are now softer, his faucets and toilets are sparkling, even the vegetables in the garden taste better. Heinichen has also become the self-proclaimed mayor of Tank Town, a business that sells collecting tanks and just about everything else any enterprising person needs for gathering H2O (assuming he or she lives in a farily nonpolluted area with decent rainfall): PVC pipes, gutters, pumps, roof washers, filters, and a funny, down-to-the-last-detail book by Heinichen and Banks (with companion video) called Rainwater Collection for the Mechanically Challenged. Heinichen recently started bottling his rainwater, too – and you know, it really does taste good. (For information on becoming a citizen of Tank Town – i.e., a tank owner – and finding Tank Town bottled rainwater and the how-to book and video, see THE PANTRY, page 98.)

My Business

Rain Man
My Business – January 2004
By: Shannon Scully

Talking to Richard Heinichen makes you thirsty. The self-proclaimed mayor of Tank Town (www.rainwatercollection.com) is a man-made drinking water expert. Unable to tolerate the sulfur-smelling well water he found when he moved to the Texas Hill Country 13 years ago, Heinichen started collecting rainwater for use at home. After noticing the fiberglass tank he used to collect the rain, a neighbor asked him to help him install a similar system.

That was the first drop in the bucket of a business whose profits have poured in ever since. “Rainwater is the sweetest, most natural water on earth,” says Heinichen, who holds the first permit for bottling rainwater ever issued in the United States. “It has never touched the ground, and it’s softness can’t be reproduced.”

For the agua-challenged people who don’t want to install their own collection systems, Heinichen also sells bottled rainwater. “When I first got into the business, I was dealing with serious wackos, people who had conspiracy theories about public water supplies,” says Heinichen. “But now I’m dealing with well-educated people who understand the health benefits.”

To skeptics who wonder about the cleanliness of rainwater, Heinichen assures customers that the reverse osmosis method he uses rids the water of any inpurities. Take a sip for yourself, he says.

American Way

Bottled Rain
American Way – May 2003
By: Richard A. Marini

Think far outside the box and put your energy into something you believe in. You might call it Entrepreneur 101.

The arid hills west of Austin, Texas, might seem an unlikely place to start a rainwater bottling company. But entreprenuers often take root in inhospitable soil, and this is where Richard Heinichen started bottling his “fresh-squeezed cloud juice,” which he named, simply, Rainwater.

He did other things right, too, acording to Larry W. Cox, director of research at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which promotes entreprenuership.

RECOGNIZE WHERE OPPORTUNITIES EXIST
In retrospect, bottling rainwater makes perfect sense, especially in central Texas where many homeowners depend of wells for drinking water. “Around here, well water tastes like sulfur. A lot of people turn to rainwater,” says Heinichen. “It’s clean, odorless, and tasteless.”

But the idea of rainwater didn’t occur to Heinichen until one scorching day when he drank up his supply while on a job. Rather than buy regular bottled water, he drove an hour home to refill from his own cictern. “That’s when I knew that if I could get people to try it, there’d be demand for bottled rainwater.”

BELIEVE IN YOURSELF AND YOUR IDEA
Because he’s such an evangelist for bottled rainwater, Heinichen says he’s the best person to sell it – even though he concedes that he’s not the word’s greatest salesperson (I’m an artist,” he explains. “I don’t like rejection.”)

Heinichen doesn’t advertise. He relies on word of mouth. Visitors can’t leave his office without carrying home a free sample. 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. Drinking bottled rainwater apparently appealed to Austin’s progressive mentality.

“Now stores are calling and asking to sell it,” says Heinichen. “I’ve even got several distributers who carry it in their lines.”

KNOW WHEN TO RELY ON OTHERS AND WHEN TO EXPAND
Although Heinichen knows enough about home rainwater systems to have produced a book and video, when the time came to build a commercial bottling operation, he hired one of the country’s leading environmental engineering and consulting firms. What’s ironic, he says, is that the firm didn’t make any changes on the prefiltration side of the process.

“Rainwater is cleaner than springwater,” he explains. “So they only had to do some work on the bottling side. 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.

Breathe

Rain Man
Breathe – September/October, 2005
By: Jennifer Acosta

When threatening clouds gather over the rolling fields of Richard Heinichen’s Texas Hill Country farm, the 57-year-old smiles–and with good reason. As the self-proclaimed mayor of “Tank Town,” a collection of 10,000-gallon Easter-egg-colored vessels on the west side of the farm, it’s Heinichen’s job to catch the water that falls from the sky, which he then bottles and sells nationwide.

Heinichen got the idea for his product, dubbed Rain Water, in 1992, after being disappointed by the taste and mineral content of water from a well he’d drilled. Developing his own rainwater collection system, he gathered “cloud juice” that was soft and sweet-smelling. Today, he produces about 5,000 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. “Herbicides and heavy metals–people don’t know they’re drinking those.”

Rain Water has become popular and fashionable in Heinichen’s home state–guests at the funky Hotel San Jose in Austin find it in their rooms. 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.org).

The biggest challenge has been convincing people that water from the sky can be a clean, safe beverage. “They still think it’s dirty,” Heinichen complains. “But it falls through the air they’re breathing every second of the day.” The Texas entrepreneur, however, is game to address this misconception: “I’ll take that on next,” he says, smiling. “I’ll give people cleaner air.”

Austin-American Statesman

When It Rains, He Stores
Austin-American Statesman – July 2002
By: Denise Gamino

Who among us has not stood in a soft rain shower with mouth wide open to try to catch some liquid sky?

There’s just something primeval about free-falling rainwater that makes us tilt our earthboud heads and await the nectar of clouds. But, unless you’re a big mouth, drinking rainwater in real time means getting more rain on you than in you.

Not anymore: When the sky melts, Richard Heinichen is there to catch it.

Heinichen is believed to be the only person in the United States bottling rainwater for commercial sale.

And is’t Austin-area rainwater. Or, as Heinichen calls it on his labels: “Fresh-squeezed Cloud Juice. Made between Heaven and Earth over Dripping Springs, Texas.”

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 250,000 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.

His fiberglass storage tanks are full of last year’s rain. He has 200,000 gallons of stored rainwater just ready to turn into bottled water, which he began selling 10 months ago.

“I can bottle for a year and two months without any rain,” he said. “So, I don’t even need (the recent) rain.”

Heinichen hoards his rainwater in plain view. If you are driving on U.S. 290, look for the field of pastel water tanks three miles west of Dripping Springs. Some of the tanks are 15 feet high and hold 17,000 gallons. His property, which he calls “Tank Town,” looks like a cylindrical Stonehenge splashed in Easter egg colors. Near the tanks are six arched tin roofs with 20,000 square feet of surface to capture rain. A field of lavendar and rosemary perfumes the air.

“I want to celebrate this stuff,” he said.

All visitors to the whimsical “Tank Town” recieve a free sample of government-approved bottled rainwater.

Twist open a bottle of the straightforwardly named Rain Water. Take a sip, and the first thing you’ll notice is…nothing. There’s a complete absence of taste. 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.

Bottles of Rain Water are showing up at a few cafes on South Congress Avenue and soon will be sold at the Central Market Cafe on North Lamar Boulevard. The cafe at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center sells is, and Gov. Rick Perry and his family get regular deliveries from Tank Town. And the water is so popular at the Salt Lick that some customers won’t drink anything but the 16-ounce bottles that sell for $1. The water often sells out.

“Last week, these two ladies came in and asked if we had Rain Water and they freaked out just because we didn’t have any,” said Holly Bennight, assistant manager.

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.

Rainwater transformed Heinichen from a metal sculptor who created the giant “fork in the road” in front of Hyde Park Bar & Grille in Austin to a quiet rainwater evangelist living life by the drop.

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 1994. 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. Ninety-nine percent of Heinichen’s business is selling and installing rainwater collection systems.

The idea for selling bottled water came on a hot summer day in 1998 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.

“I refused to go buy water in a store,” he said, “because it just didn’t taste as good.”

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 40-mile detour?

“There is no water that can touch it,” he said. “It’s the gold standard of water. 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.

“Rainwater is not a source for drinking water,” more than one official told him. “It’s not approved.”

“Well, what water have you been drinking?” Heinichen asked, pointing out that all fresh-water sources are fed by rain.

With the help of an engineer, Heinichen was certified by the Texas Department of Health as a bottled water plant operator. A permit from the Texas Natural Resource Conversation Commission was tougher to obtain because Heinichen refused to disinfect the rainwater with chlorine. Most public drinking water systems use trace amounts of chemical disinfectant, such as chlorine.

The TNRCC eventually approved Heinichen’s rainwater system because of his extra safeguards. Instead of chemicals, Heinichen uses several filtering processes and then subjects the rainwater to ultraviolet light and reverse osmosis to kill anhy remaining bacteria and contaminants. In addition, his system operates as a “closed loop” that guards against outside bacteria because the water is not exposed to air once it leaves the rooftop.

Heinichen is bottling 60 cases a day, but he has the capacity to quadruple his output. And, if consumer demand outpaces his two-room bottling plant, he is willing to expand.

“I could keep up with the big boys,” he said. “Easily, I’d love to be able to supply everybody with water the way it ought to taste.”

One raindrop at a time.