HALIFAX—They have to shout down to the bottling floor to find Thomas Steinhart.

That’s where he’s been spending all of his time for the past couple of days, an extremely turbulent couple of days in the history of Steinhart Distillery.

He used to fill those bottles with vodka and gin — some of the best gin in the world, according to his awards from just last year: Best Classic Gin, Best Canadian Gin, Best Gold Canadian Flavoured Gin at the 2019 World Gin Awards in London.

Today, though, he’s filling bottles with hand sanitizer, yet another reminder of how strange things have become in a coronavirus world.

If it seems like a long journey from boutique spirits to producing bottles of hand sanitizer, it’s not; Thomas Steinhart made that trip in a day.

In a pinch because of a massive slump in orders for his boutique gins and vodkas, Steinhart’s distillery in Arisaig, N.S., about 200 kilometres northeast of Halifax, looked to be facing a bleak summer.

And then things began to happen quickly. On Thursday, Steinhart sat down with his staff for a brainstorming session. With no end in sight to the coronavirus outbreak, restaurants and bars had cut back on their orders. Steinhart was projecting a 50 to 90 per cent drop in sales. He worried about how he was going to pay his six full-time workers, let alone his seasonal staff.

They talked about the coronavirus. One of his staff mentioned they had been looking for hand sanitizer and couldn’t find any. A light bulb went on.

On Friday, he was in the hand sanitizer business.

“I started calling around. Where can I get bottles? Where can I get the ingredients? I already have the alcohol, but I didn’t have the rest,” he says over the phone from his distillery. In the background is the rattling sound of hundreds of bottles being filled.

An effective hand sanitizer needs to have a minimum of 60 per cent alcohol. Just to be on the safe side, Steinhart upped that number to 70 per cent. That level of alcohol will kill the coronavirus. But if you use just that on your hands, they’ll dry out in a couple of days and start cracking. It needs a moisturizing agent.

Many sanitizers use aloe vera, but Steinhart opted for coconut oil and olive oil as a moisturizer. Add in a little elemental oil of lemon and orange to enhance the smell — and dissuade anyone who might try drinking it — and you have Steinhart’s All-Natural Hand Sanitizer.

By Tuesday, he had his entire staff, bookkeepers and sales people included, on the bottling line.

“Right now, we’re concentrating on production and then distribution will happen. Probably through convenience stores,” he says.

He started off selling just a few bottles, then word spread.

Today, he says, he’s getting orders not only from his hometown of Antigonish, but also from nearby Pictou County, and most recently from Halifax.

“At seven o’clock this morning, somebody posted on Facebook. I haven’t been on my phone in two hours, and I have over 200 messages. And our phone here hasn’t stopped ringing,” he says.

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At $15 for a 200-millilitre bottle, Steinhart figures he’ll make enough to pay his staff for the immediate future, and maybe turn a little profit for himself. But he’s also planning to donate 20 per cent of each order to local food banks. Some of his customers are following suit.

“We had customers this morning, they bought five bottles for themselves, and another five for their food bank,” he says.

Of course, in this coronavirus-outbreak economy, there can be a convergent evolution of ideas.

In Toronto, Spirit of York, a distiller of gin, vodka and whiskey, has also begun producing hand sanitizer from ethanol.

Spirit of York founder Gerry Guitor says the decision was inspired, in part, by recent stories of hoarding.

“We were appalled at this person who was hoarding this hand sanitizer and trying to sell it on Amazon and eBay,” he says. “And we were talking about how, in times of crisis, you always get people who try to take advantage of the crisis. And we said, ‘Well, what can we do?’”

What they had lots of was ethanol … and some room on their production line. What they needed was a recipe for hand sanitizer. They got that from the World Health Organization. After a few tweaks, Guitor said, they’re now in a position to distribute it.

Like Steinhart, Spirit of York has also felt the economic crunch of the times. But, says Guitor, part of his company’s mandate has always been community service.

“This wasn’t really a shift for business reasons, it was just a utilization of capacity. Mind you … if we were at full-fledged capacity then we may not have been able to do that flexible change and adapt this way. But it was really more a values motivation than an economic one.”

He says all the proceeds from Spirit of York’s hand sanitizer are destined for the food bank. He also says that they’ll give the sanitizer to people who can’t afford to buy it themselves.

“We should all be doing this. Full-court press on trying to help our communities, right? And if anybody wants to know what the formula is? Any distilleries out there that want to do this to help their communities? The World Health Organization has a formula. So let’s get it done.”

Correction — March 18, 2020 — An earlier version of this story misstated the location of Arisaig, N.S. The story has been updated.

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