Katya Mosely remembers the exact moment it all began, a few years ago. “It was my daughter’s piano teacher,” she says. “She had a 6-inch-long stick of charcoal floating in her glass water bottle.
I saw it, and that’s what sent me down the rabbit hole.” Mosely, the owner of Spirit Gate Acupuncture & Wellness in Mid City, was already using a Brita to purify her tap water, but she wasn’t sure she trusted the results. So down she went, spiraling deep into the world of charcoal-based filters, where she eventually landed on an odd-looking contraption with a friendly name: The Berkey.
A stainless-steel vessel that claims to remove more impurities than better-known filters, the standard Berkey is nearly 20 inches tall and looks a bit like a cross between a Russian samovar and a decommissioned missile casing. By comparison, a plastic fridge-dwelling Brita appears toy-like — a Huffy trike parked next to a Tesla Cybertruck. The Berkey can also be harder to maintain than other systems, with long-lasting filters that require periodic cleaning.
And it’s much, much slower, taking hours to filter a full 2.25-gallon tank. Which is all to say, it was exactly what Mosely wanted.
As a bonus, her Berkey now delivers more than just clean, crisp-tasting water at work. “People come through my office and see it and give me a little nod of acknowledgment. Like, ‘Oh, she knows what’s up.
Look at her Big Berkey,’” she says, laughing. The if-you-know-you-know appeal of Berkey .