For a stb, regular water works fine.
If your dealing with salts, and evaporating water to get your products, starting with clean water is a good precaution. My tap water is ph 8.5, its great water, small town mountain water, but it has stuff in it. Just natural stuff that's in water, dissolved salts and such. But I've found using distilled water give just a little more purity, and its a cheap and easy precaution anyway. All my brewing also takes place with distilled water as well, just so i don't have to acidify very much.
"let those who have talked to the elves, find each other and band together" -TMK
In a society in which nearly everybody is dominated by somebody else's mind or by a disembodied mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn the truth about the activities of governments and corporations, about the quality or value of products, or about the health of one's own place and economy.
In such a society, also, our private economies will depend less upon the private ownership of real, usable property, and more upon property that is institutional and abstract, beyond individual control, such as money, insurance policies, certificates of deposit, stocks, etc. And as our private economies become more abstract, the mutual, free helps and pleasures of family and community life will be supplanted by a kind of displaced citizenship and by commerce with impersonal and self-interested suppliers...
The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.” - Wendell Berry