The Aurmina Chronicles And Your Step-by-Step Water Guide - The Mother of all FAQ's

Part startup confessional, part practical handbook: two Lisas, one mineral mission, and everything you need to set up Aurmina in your home without emailing our CEO at 2 a.m.

Cyber Monday Sale!

Aurmina is flying off the shelves, and the messages you’re sending inject joy into our group chats! So here it is: 25% off every bottle. No limit. Stock up. Code: CYBERMONDAY

Buy too much. Your cells deserve it. With ridiculous gratitude (and zero marketing department),

Pierre, Lisa & Scott

Today’s Substack post is a mix of story and how-to. If you’re here for the “just tell me what to buy and how to set it up” version of purifying, structuring, and mineral-balancing your home water, I wrote a much more concise guide the other day. You can find it at this link.

And suppose you’re the type who likes to read every detail before touching a new product. In that case, Aurmina’s FAQ page is essentially our attempt to answer every question imaginable — right up until someone emails us a question we forgot to include.

One more thing on the “housekeeping” side: for those interested in joining the Aurmina family as an affiliate marketer or wholesaler, go to affiliate enrollment or wholesaler registration.

Inside Aurmina: A Week of Chaos, Gratitude, and Two Lisas

Welcome to our start-up, where the chaos is real, and the gratitude is loud

Lisa (her other website is here)— as many of you now know — is not only my wife, but also the newly anointed CEO of Aurmina®. These last few months have been a whirlwind, and this week felt like the peak of it: Scott, Lisa, and I are thrilled, exhausted, grateful — and mildly concussed. When your company is in its infancy and its “team” consists of three as-yet-unpaid employees (two of whom ‘moonlight” as busy clinicians and writers), job titles lose all meaning.

My mineral guide and advisor in this venture, Matt Bakos, is someone who has quickly become one of the most important (and cherished) people in my life. The reason is that, although Matt and I are not directly connected business-wise, we have become partners on a spiritual, literary (the book would and could never have been written without Matt), and global mission-driven level. I want to say here that the amount of support the Bakos’ have given the Korys’, Scott, and Aurmina has been extraordinary and unremitting.

Despite the support, our intrepid CEO currently wears more hats than a Broadway costume department. At Aurmina, her title means: Congratulations — you are now responsible for absolutely everything.

In the span of a few months, Lisa has gone from zero to juggling every possible dimension of a start-up: engaging trademark and legal firms, hiring and interacting with consultants for supplement and biostimulant regulatory pathways, creating business entities, setting up bank accounts, building multiple Shopify websites from scratch, wrestling with the unholy QuickBooks–Shopify integration (days of calls, emails, and tears), and recently — with inexplicable enthusiasm — setting up our HR system. And that’s just the “executive” work.

Meanwhile, I get to play the “distracted writer,” shut up in my office, not to be disturbed (although I am constantly), wrestling with my magnum opus, with some days more evocative of Jack Nicholson in The Shining (but don’t tell Lisa K that).

Anyway, there is also the part of business most CEOs outsource immediately — customer service. Watching her handle it has impressed me to no end and given me a whole new appreciation for the phrase “labor of love.”

Lisa hates bad customer service with a passion and refuses to inflict it on anyone else. “I hate companies with bad customer service. You can’t do that to people,” she keeps saying, more recently and more often after receiving horrific customer service from yet another company we’ve had to deal with while building ours. (Truly — the irony is brutal.)

There’s also a funny little subplot here. Matt and I share several strange congruities — Hungarian fathers, a borderline-religious devotion to reggae and the Grateful Dead, as well as deeper, more uncanny connections that show up later in the book.

Naturally, we also each have a wife named Lisa. So my Lisa has officially been rechristened “Lisa K” in our household, because Matt’s wife — “Lisa B” — has also been in the mineral world for more than twenty years.

As mentioned earlier, the Bakos’s have been an extraordinary support to us — spiritually, intellectually, practically. Matt’s mineral knowledge is savant-level; Lisa B’s operational and business experience in this space seems to cover every blind spot. Their guidance has been constant, generous, and indispensable. Scott Marsland, my partner at the Leading Edge Clinic (who is also leading Primora Bio, our biostimulant division), will tell you the same thing.

The result is that in every conversation between Matt and me — and there are usually at least two per day, none under an hour — one of the Lisas comes up within thirty seconds. A question to ask them, a task they’re handling, or some historical knowledge only they possess. Referring to “Lisa” no longer works. Thus: “Lisa K,” “Lisa B”… all day long. Why explaining that required so many paragraphs, I have no idea. That is my brain on minerals, I guess.

Anyway, what was the point? Ah, yes: to explain that, on top of doing the work of five departments, Lisa K is also drowning in customer service. As interest in Aurmina has grown, so has the flood of emails, support tickets, affiliate inquiries, distributor requests, and general chaos. She now spends hours hunched over her laptop, clicking and typing like she’s playing some high-stakes video game.

People from all over the world write in: credit cards failing, weird Shopify error messages, questions about dosing, misunderstandings about international ordering (F.Y.I. - you need to email info@aurmina.com for that — her new inbox), or messages announcing that “Aurmina is sold out” (it’s not; that’s just Shopify being Shopify).

Yesterday’s highlight was a person who wrote: “How much does a bottle cost with the discount?” Which means our website is still failing at its one job: showing… the price. Excellent.

Meanwhile, the Kory household is buzzing like a beehive. I’m preparing to submit the final-final-final version of my manuscript — leaner, sharper, more coherent, and infinitely stronger than the version I serialized on Substack. It had crept up to 100,000 words at one point, and putting it on a forced diet was one of the most agonizing but ultimately rewarding things I’ve ever done. It is now lean, mean, and ready to go.

This chapter of life — the company-building, the book-finishing, the two Lisas, the three-person start-up sprint — is chaotic, hilarious, stressful, and oddly beautiful. It feels like the early days of something with real momentum. And the best part is that the people doing it with me are the kind you would choose if you ever had the chance.

More updates coming soon — including a glimpse into the global interest pouring in, the biostimulant project Scott is building, and the quiet revolutions happening behind the scenes.

For now, know this: Aurmina is growing. The mission is expanding. And at the center of everything, the two Lisas are keeping this whole thing standing upright — one email, one website fix, one late-night strategy session at a time.

Stay tuned. The fun is just beginning.

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Aurmina and Adya Clarity Water Purification, Structuring, and Mineral Balancing Products

Aurmina and Adya Clarity are the two modern expressions of Shimanishi’s work. Add them to water, and they do what nature has always done: bind impurities, clarify, structure, and restore charge. Contaminants settle out, the water reorders (structures) itself, and what remains is cleaner, more coherent, and electrically balanced — the way natural water behaves.

Although these solutions contain a broad spectrum of ionic minerals, most exist only in trace amounts (ppm or ppb). They are not dietary supplements, nor are they meant to supply minerals. Their role is purely functional: purifying and rebalancing water.

Separately, we are now developing higher-concentration mineral supplementation formulations (Aurviva). And at Leading Edge Clinic, we’ve begun an IRB-approved study evaluating Aurmina’s ability to bind and support the excretion of heavy metals.

Setting Up A Purification and Structuring Process For Your Home

OK, now, on to the real point of this post (what the nostalgic intro was trying to get to): to provide some guidance that will hopefully take the strain and burdens off our CEO in a significant way. So let’s walk through how to integrate Aurmina into your (and your family’s) daily life — mostly so Lisa can stop serving as the unofficial global Aurmina help desk. (Half joke, half plea).

Water Purification For The Home

To get a feel for how to purify water from different sources with Aurmina, let’s start with water of unknown purity and then move to less suspect sources. The principle is simple: the cleaner the water source, the quicker and easier it is to produce pure, mineral-balanced, and structured water full of vitality.

Now, for those with R.O. filter systems on countertop distillers, the items needed and the process involved are much simpler than those below; you can scroll down if that is all you are interested in.

Municipal and Well-Water Sources

Let’s start with the average household, like ours - we drink the municipal water in Sarasota, FL. First, you need a “set-up.” By that I mean: 1) containers for water undergoing treatment with Aurmina, 2) a water filter system, and 3) a container for treated water to be dispensed from, for drinking or cooking purposes.

The Kory “Ham-Hock” Method

My long-time readers will be familiar with the term “ham-hock” from this prior Substack post, which pictorially detailed the history of my ham-hocked home improvement and/or child entertainment projects.

Here I will share my specific ham-hocked “set-up” for water purification that I put together for our home. Below are three 5L “water treatment” containers with a spigot at the bottom (available at this link). The stand that the containers rest on can be found at this link. Both were purchased from Lisa’s favorite store, IKEA (with her being Swedish, this should not come as a surprise):

An important point about the “treatment process” is that you need more than one container. You see, the one furthest to the right is the one that has been treated with minerals the longest (I shoot for 48-72 hours); thus, it has the most sediment at the bottom. The left-most one was just emptied, refilled, and treated this morning.

As I empty “the most ready/fully treated” container into our gravity-fed ceramic filter set-up (shown below), I then fill it up with water, move it to the “back of the line above,” and then add Aurmina. Easy enough, no?

Now, I will introduce you to our bad-ass ceramic gravity filter system (similar to a Berkey, or you could use this water bucket filter). The one below comes from Korea and is no longer available here in the U.S, but there are many other options on Amazon or Google (or see this post I wrote the other day, which provides links and options for treatment containers, gravity filters, etc).

I pour the water that has been treated the longest into the top chamber of the above filter system, where it slowly (and I mean slowly) drips down through the ceramic filter into the collection/storage chamber below. The spigot at the bottom hangs over our sink edge and thus provides us with the water we drink and cook from. Viola!

Now, no offense to all you R.O. and distilled water people, but I personally prefer my “ham hock method” because,

1) I somehow like doing the chore, “preparing and purifying our drinking water”

and,

2) It makes me feel useful around the house because it is literally the only chore Lisa lets me do.

You see, “Lisa K” has determined that I do not know how to do laundry correctly, and she has never trusted a kitchen I cleaned without her supervision. More accurately, every time I clean the kitchen by myself, I then find her spending 30 minutes repeating everything I did, but better. So I stopped. She has never complained.

Treatment of Potable Water From Municipal or Well Sources

1. Dose of Aurmina/Adya: 1-2 tsp per gallon, based on local water quality

2. Treatment Time: 24 - 72 hours, also depending in local water quality (and patience).

3. Filtration Step: Pour through any gravity-fed water filter or Brita-type filter

Note: If you notice a slight lemon-like flavor, reduce the amount to ½ teaspoon per gallon to achieve a more neutral, balanced taste.

Reverse Osmosis (RO) And Distilled Water Systems

In ideal conditions, both distilled and RO water are pure or nearly pure, but buildup in pipes or filters of an RO system can reduce quality. To evaluate how well your R.O. system is currently functioning, do the following “test”:

1. Add 1 teaspoon per gallon of Aurmina, stir well, and let sit overnight.

2. If visible sediment falls to the bottom, it may be time to service or replace your RO filters.

If the water remains clear, you can just fill a drinking container with your R.O. or distilled water, add the usual amount of Aurmina, and shake or stir; the water is ready for use within minutes.

The R.O. and Distilled Water “Quirk” With Aurmina

Sometimes, even when the R.O. filter system and pipes are clean and/or the countertop distiller is working correctly, the water still turns yellow, albeit without significant precipitate settling. What gives?

1) RO and Distilled Water Are “Chemically Empty” and Hyper-Reactive

In chemistry, RO/distilled water is “hungry”—with no ions or buffering, it reacts instantly. So when you add Aurmina, its minerals have nothing to compete with, and it responds immediately. Think of RO/distilled water as a blank canvas where every brushstroke shows.

“Hungry” water has almost no buffering capacity which means that pH can swing wildly with just a few drops of anything ionic. Since Iron (and other trace ions) are extremely sensitive to pH, slight shifts can oxidize ferrous iron (Fe2+) into ferric iron (Fe3+), which is yellow to rust-colored. This oxidation can happen even if the absolute amount of iron is tiny — parts per billion.

2) Trace Metals Can Precipitate Even in Pure Water When pH Changes

In tap, well, or spring water, there are plenty of dissolved minerals and buffers that keep metals stable and invisible. In RO/distilled water:

• There’s nothing to stabilize trace metals.

• The minerals in Aurmina have no competition and therefore readily form micro-particles, flocs, or oxides.

Sometimes they fully precipitate. Sometimes they remain suspended and produce a uniform yellow tint.

3) The Glass Itself Can Participate in the Reaction

This part surprises people. Glass is not chemically inert — especially in low-mineral, low-pH-buffer environments. RO/distilled water + ionic minerals = the perfect scenario for:

• Adsorption (minerals sticking to the glass surface),

• Micro-abrasion points accumulating oxidized minerals,

• Light scattering that enhances the appearance of yellow/brown staining.

Different glass types (borosilicate vs. soda-lime) will behave differently, too. This staining is harmless and does not affect water safety or quality. It can be removed with a vinegar soak, using either plain vinegar or a 1:1 water-to-vinegar mixture.

Solution for yellow tint: here, you will have to join the municipal and healthy water crowd by adding 10% municipal water to the R.O. or distilled water, treat the water with Aurmina for 24 hours, then run it through a filter. Now you are good to go.

Home Distilled Water - The “Marsland Method”

My Leading Edge Clinic partner, Scott Marsland, in all his brilliance, advocates buying a home water distiller and distilling your tap water. Modern distillers like his can distill a gallon in about 3 hours. Once you distill the water, all you have to do is add the black mica minerals, and you are ready to drink and/or cook with it!

From Scott: “We have been distilling our drinking water for 30 years and have tried many different brands, but the WaterWise distiller was the best - super reliable, fast, and American-made, lasting over 15 years with excellent support if an issue arose. Our current WaterWise 3200 produces a gallon in three hours.”

Scott loves that thing so much he never shuts up about it (a joke - sort of :). Thus, he tried to get an affiliate link for me to use in this post, but was unsuccessful. So, know that his recommendation comes free of any COI :)

Conclusion

For a short, focused version of the information contained in this post, the “just tell me what to buy and how to set it up” version of purifying, structuring, and mineral-balancing your home water, see this more concise guide I wrote the other day.

And if you’re the type who likes to read every detail before touching a new product, go to Aurmina’s FAQ page, which is essentially our attempt to answer every question imaginable — right up until someone emails us a question we forgot to include.

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More Stuff (pre-order books etc):

If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the other “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I try to get out to the public), supporting my work is greatly appreciated.

P.S. If you’re curious about the volcanic-mineral water purification product that I helped develop, you can find it at Aurmina.com. See below for the number of contaminants it can remove from your water.

2. Contaminants: If you’ve read Chapter 19, “What’s Really in Your Water,” you already know how critical purification and remineralization are in an increasingly industrial world. Based on extensive testing, below is a list of some of the 250 pollutants and toxins that Aurmina removes (a sight to behold):

3) Upcoming Book Publications

Yup — not one, but two books are dropping from yours truly (at the same time? What?)

1. If, instead of (or in addition to) this Substack version, you prefer the feel of a real book—or the smell of paper—or like to give holiday gifts, pre-order From Volcanoes to Vitality, my grand mineral saga, shipping before Christmas.

2. And if you want to read (or gift) another chronicle of suppression, science, and survival, grab The War on Chlorine Dioxide—the sequel you didn’t see coming—shipping mid-January. On this one, I say: “Buy it before they ban it.” Hah!

This chapter is original material and protected under international copyright law. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author.