Philippa Stevenson: Source for the home brewer is sauce for the fashionable sipper

Sipping from a branded water bottle may be the height of fashion but some people like to go right to the source for their daily aqua fix.

There are, for instance, the intrepid souls who brave the fast flowing traffic on State Highway 29 atop the Kaimai ranges to slake their thirst at a roadside spring.

Sited almost at the range summit near the scenic lookout which provides stunning views of the Waikato Valley, the water gushes through a piece of alkathene pipe and pools on the hillside road verge.

A wooden pallet has been placed in the puddle, to allow people to keep their feet dry while filling their bottles.

But it's not tapped for just the odd bottle, or a radiator top-up. Anyone taking frequent trips between the Waikato and Bay of Plenty will have seen the place used, at times, as some kind of wholesale water filling station. All manner of vehicles laden with large plastic containers pull up and fill up.

Big users are, apparently, most likely to be home brewers. Chris Henry of Brew Your Own in Hamilton said brewers liked the water because it contained no chlorine and was highly oxygenated, which helped start the fermentation process.

He had only used the water once and had a brewing disaster because the "turkey" who had collected the water put it in dirty containers.

Mr Henry's preferred spring water is another roadside source south of Te Kuiti where the limestone rocks provide an even greater boost to fermentation.

But he knows the Kaimai spring well. He recalled days gone by when he raced his motorbike from Cambridge up the rough 1970s roads to the top where he'd have a cuppa and a toasted sandwich at the springs cafe before heading back down the hill again.

The cafe, which at one time offered a hearty Devonshire tea as well, caught fire and was later demolished about 1976. Mr Henry recalled there was a fairly novel device - a water ram - to pump the water into a tank to service the cafe, and also across the road to public toilets.

The spring is on land owned since about 1912 by the Swap family whose Matamata-based company J Swap Contractors is well known in the Waikato for earth moving and road building.

David Swap said locals called it Joe Swap's water after his father, who leased the land to the original owners of the cafe which was built around 1950 and lasted about 25 years.

Now 61, Mr Swap recalled as a youngster riding horses with his father to the summit, which was then a scrub-covered bog.

After the cafe went he put in the pipe so today's travellers wouldn't have to clamber over rocks to get the water.

Occasionally vandals demolish his handiwork but it's soon replaced and thousands of people stop each year to get the water. They are most welcome to continue to do so, he said.

Environment Waikato hydrogeologist John Hadfield doubted the council, in whose region the spring lies, had ever tested the water. There was some potential risk from it, he said.

But Mr Swap, who has never had the water tested either, is confident it is good, clean stuff because it comes out of rock. A bore taps the same source and that water is pumped around the farm. "We never have any trouble with stock on that property," he said.

Mr Swap is well aware of the fashion for drinking large quantities of water; he also believes in its health-giving properties but is happy slurping his straight from the tap. In the meantime, for many, the spring offers a cheap alternative to commercialised spring water.

* Email Philippa Stevenson