Despite having to close their doors last week due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Annex Ale Project has got something new brewing for Calgarians.

By late next week, the craft brewery, located in the Manchester Industrial neighbourhood, hopes to be releasing around 7,000 cans of hand sanitizer each week for the foreseeable future to the shelves of a Calgary grocery store.

“We’re going to call this a hand sanitizer refill,” owner Andrew Bullied said. “There are these shortages of hand sanitizer all over the city and the World Health Organization (WHO) put together basically a recipe for anyone that needs to make it, so I figured if I make alcohol most of the time anyway, why not just pivot a little bit.”

Bullied and his team will use the WHO’s recipe, which contains hydrogen peroxide, glycerol and 80 per cent ethanol. The mixture will start as a wash — which is the final product of beer fermentation before distillation — and will then have the ethanol removed to start the base of the hand sanitizer.

“We’ll be using our commercial-grade stainless steel (vat) . . . It’s very easily cleaned and then once we have hand sanitizer in there, too, I mean, really, what would be cleaner than what’s held 3,000 litres of hand sanitizer,” Bullied said with a laugh.

Working with Raft Beer Labs, another Calgary-based company that does quality assurance for breweries, Bullied said he and his team will be able to produce around 3,000 litres of hand sanitizer each week.

The canned sanitizer, once brought home and opened, must be transferred to another sealed container such as a soap dispenser or shampoo bottle, so the alcohol doesn’t evaporate.

Bullied said the inspiration came from needing to find a way to keep some normalcy in his business and continue paying his employees.

“I had no intention of ever doing this,” Bullied said. “But we have people that we need to keep employed and we’ve got a bigger purpose that we can serve here in the Calgary community.”

Though Bullied said he hasn’t received any formal approval from the government to make the hand sanitizer and then sell it, he said there are likely special circumstances in these times.

But hand sanitizer isn’t all Bullied’s stainless steel beer vats will be brewing.

“We also have to make a little bit of beer, too, just to keep our yeast alive so that when the COVID-19 crisis is over, we can start our business again and start serving beer to people,” he said, “I think everyone is going to need a drink after this.”

ocondon@postmedia.com