This American city perfected clean water for beer — now it’s fighting to keep cancer-causing nitrates out of the tap

This story was originally published by Circle of Blue.

Ever since Jacob Leinenkugel discovered spring waters here that were pure enough to brew his famous beer, this small Wisconsin city’s devotion to clean water has been paramount. 

That’s why in 1997, when Chippewa Falls utility managers detected potentially dangerous concentrations of nitrates in a well supplying city water, officials acted. They installed new filtration equipment in their treatment system and drilled deeper wells into cleaner aquifers to ensure the water delivered to the city’s 16,000 customers contained nitrates at concentrations less than 10 parts per million, the level deemed safe by federal law. It costs Chippewa Falls $200,000 a year to operate the system. 

But what seemed to be a perfectly sensible move to protec...