Photo: Broken Oak Distilling Company

By Shane Clausing

Fight against COVID

Local distillery looking to help community by making hand sanitizer during COVID-19 outbreak

Mar 20, 2020 | 5:00 AM

The Broken Oak Distilling Company in Grande Prairie is looking to switch from making spirits to making hand sanitizer for those in need during the COVID-19 outbreak.

This trend has popped up in North America not long after the outbreak began, and it has slowly taken off.

Shawn Herbert is the owner of the Broken Oak Distilling Company says they wanted to jump in on that trend, and help out the community while hand sanitizer is hard to find.

“We’ve seen there was some other distilleries doing it across the country and we had so many people asking us for it, so we decided to look in and see if it was even possible or not. That’s really when we kicked it into gear and see that we were able to do it and got the approval from AGLC,” said Herbert.

As of right now the company hasn’t been able to make any hand sanitizer. They have some products coming, but it’s not a large quantity. They hope that the products will arrive on Sunday and then they can begin their first trial batch.

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In order to make hand sanitizer, the company needs hydrogen peroxide at 3% and glycerol at 98%.

Herbert says that making hand sanitizer was never a thought they had, but it actually ends up being beneficial for distillers.

“What we’re using is our byproducts of making our own vodka. We use the hedge that we normally dump down the drain so it’s actually a way that we can utilize our wasted alcohol.”

If the company can get the ingredients they need, Herbert says that the sanitizer could be made quickly.

Because the sanitizer bottles are sold-out everywhere, the company plans on taking some of their mickey bottles that were originally to be used for vodka and try to use that as their hand sanitizer bottles. The only thing they would need is labels for their bottles.

Herbert and his company say they aren’t in this for the money, and that they want to help the community.

“The biggest drive behind it was the thoughts of how many people are going out there and hoarding all the hand sanitizer for themselves when there are so many elderly, kids and people with deficiencies that could use it. We’re hoping to get it out to the community and make just enough to cover our costs.”