Every glass of mountain water was snow first.
India has some five million springs, by the estimate of a working group convened by NITI Aayog, and about three million of them rise in the Indian Himalayan Region. Some fifty million people in the twelve Himalayan states rely on them for the water they drink. Before it is anything else, Himalayan water is somebody’s village tap.
A spring is the end of a long, slow journey. Snow settles on the high slopes through the winter. When it melts, some of the melt runs straight off the mountain, but much of it soaks into cracked rock and moves through it underground, for months or for years, until the ground turns it back towards the surface.
A spring there is, quite literally, last winter’s snow.
Hydrologists can tell where a spring’s water came from by its isotopes: the slightly different weights of the hydrogen and oxygen in it. Studying springs in the western Himalaya, a team led by the hydrologist G. Jeelani found snowmelt supplying between 55 and 96 percent of their flow, with glacier melt and rain making up the rest.
The rock is not a pipe. Granite, gneiss and basalt each give up a little of themselves on the way: calcium, magnesium, bicarbonate. Those are the dissolved solids a water report counts, and the reason water from two neighbouring valleys can taste unlike. In blind tastings, panels rate water with fewer than 300 milligrams of dissolved solids per litre as excellent; springs fed by fresh snowmelt often sit well below that.
pH is a measure, not a virtue. The World Health Organization treats it as a working guide for the people who treat water, not as a limit for health. We print a target pH for each of our waters and measure it in every batch, because it tells us the water is behaving as it should, not because one number is better than another.
Springs are also fragile. The same working group found many perennial springs in the region drying up or turning seasonal, as roads, settlements and a changing climate alter how snow and rain reach the ground. A spring is only ever as good as the slope above it.
That is why we describe our water by its region rather than by a romantic spot on a map, and why we keep a record of every batch. The mountain does the important work. Ours is to bring it to the table with the care it deserves, and to measure every step on the way.
Water begins as weather and becomes geology before it becomes a drink. We would rather tell that story accurately than beautifully, and we find that, told accurately, it is beautiful enough.