HOMEMADE SUGGESTIONS
HOMEmade is a monthly feature that focuses on foods that are made here in the Granite State.
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MORE INFORMATION
Chamberlain Springs can be found at Sunny Slope Farm, 118 Old Wolfeboro Road, Alton, NH 03809. The company can be reached at 875-2220 or www.chamberlainspringsnh2o.com.
By ANNETTE GALLAGHER Correspondent
Happy new year! A lot of people make resolutions this time of year, and a lot of them are about getting healthy – or healthier. One key factor of good health is getting enough water so the body can do what it’s supposed to more easily; one New Hampshire company, Chamberlain Springs, of Alton, started retailing its own NH20 spring water this past November, just in time for a new year, new you.
According to Deanna O’Shaughnessy, owner of Chamberlain Springs, along with her sister Fae Kontje-Gibbs, the Chamberlain family is one of the oldest in the Alton area, but only moved onto Sunny Slope Farm in the late 1930s, when her father was a child.
“My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Jacob and his brother Ephraim arrived together in 1770, and settled up on the New Durham ridge,” she said. “They were probably the very first of Alton’s founders to arrive in the area, according to one of Alton’s histories, anyway. Jacob’s son Jacob definitely was the first non-Indian baby born here. There has been a Chamberlain in Alton every single generation since 1770.”
The sisters inherited the farm with their father’s passing in September 2002; bottling water from the farm was a project he started investigating and continuing the process was one of his last suggestions to the sisters.
“We began the science of the permitting process in February of 2003,” she said. “After four years, 13 public hearings and over a million dollars, enormous hours of constant effort and enough science to crash our engineers’ Excel program, we achieved our large groundwater extraction permit for 223,200 gallons per day, which was granted on July 25, 2006.”
In that time, though, the bottled water market in the United States was undergoing a lot of changes.
“Many of the large bottlers in the Northeast had decided that the cost of transporting spring water was far less attractive than the idea of turning on their municipal water supply and running that water, no matter the quality, through a reverse osmosis filtration system and then making lemonade out of lemons, selling it to the consuming public as ‘purified’ and ‘mineralized,’ ” she said.
The sisters are big into the local idea, which helped move things along.
“We decided that this left a niche for us, and my sister and I, being old hippies, totally identified with the ‘localvore’ movement,” O’Shaughnessy said. “Our hydrogeologist had told us in the very beginning that our spring water was exceptional, and he begged us to never let this spring water get adulterated by being combined with others. Our community had been asking us for years, ‘When are we going to see Chamberlain Springs on a bottle?’ So, we decided to bottle our spring water ourselves.”
Chamberlain Springs NH20 had its grand opening Nov. 7 and already has distribution through Hannaford supermarkets in the Alton area, as well as a number of other smaller retailers. Water is available online by the case and is sold only in New Hampshire because of the sisters’ belief in buying locally. The company also has a fill/refill program that allows customers to bring their own containers to the farm’s water barn; O’Shaughnessy said that overall response to that fill/refill idea has been positive, but with a November opening and winter, not much has come of it yet and more activity is expected with warmer weather.
Chamberlain Springs NH20 water is available in glass bottles with one of four seasonal labels, as well as in a non-breakable bottle, “which I love because I carry it around and it is always falling out of my pocket but won’t break!” O’Shaughnessy said, laughing.
The company has no plans for adding carbonated or flavored water to their line.
“Our water is as bright and clean and clear as a diamond, and it’s a joy to see the look on people’s faces when they take their first sip,” O’Shaughnessy said.
Annette Gallagher can be reached at annettegallagher@gmail.com.
