The owner of Eight Oaks Farm Distillery is combating the unavailability and price gouging of hand sanitizer amid the COVID-19 crisis.

The family-owned distillery announced that they would switch their operations and start using their stores of ethanol to produce sanitizer, which they will be giving away for free.

Chad Butters of Eight Oaks Farm Distillery in New Tripoli, Pennsylvania, has completely shifted the focus of his business in order to serve—and possibly save—his community. Butters, an Army veteran, says that it was never a question of “if” but “how” Eight Oaks could shift their focus from making spirits to producing hand sanitizer, using their stores of grain to produce ethanol.

These started making World Health Organization (WHO)-approved sanitizer in just two days.

“You look at what is happening locally and everywhere else and you start thinking more and more what this means for you as a business. We thought about what we could do to help,” Butters told Popular Mechanics.

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After speaking with Eight Oaks’ chief branding officer about how quickly COVID-19 is spreading, Butters says that the decision was a no-brainer.



“I sent a Slack message to the team on March 14 saying, ‘we’re taking action, we can’t sit back on this. We’re going to start making hand sanitizer,’” he shares. After that, Butters shared the idea with Eight Oaks’ board of directors who unanimously greenlit the proposal.

As a distillery, Eight Oaks already had the grain to produce ethanol. But getting the other ingredients in the WHO formula—the hydrogen peroxide and glycerol—in addition to bottles for the end product “have been very difficult to come by.”

Once the ingredients were on hand, it was a matter of figuring out how production, marketing, logistics, and communications were going to help make the switch. Butters says the heaviest lift was going out and “chasing down the supply to get pieces and parts in place.”

Butters says that Eight Oaks is using their own “standard production equipment to produce the alcohol,” which usually takes approximately nine days to go “from grain to finished product.” According to Butters, the base ethanol Eight Oaks uses is a neutral spirit—a highly concentrated ethanol—which stands at around 95 percent alcohol.

“From there, we’re just adding ingredients based on the WHO formula and putting it in a bottle,” he says. Butters tells us that Eight Oaks' efforts are driven by need and that until the need has been sufficiently met, “we will [continue to] produce it.”

Butters says that by the end of the day on Monday, March 16—two days after switching production—he and his team had turned the tasting room into an operation center. By 1 p.m. that same Monday, the team had the sanitizer formula figured out. Then, by 3 p.m. “the initial sample bottles were ready to go.”

For now, Eight Oaks is focused on producing hand sanitizer to give away at no cost to hospitals, assisted living homes, and the local community.

Bottles of Eight Oaks Farm Distillery hand sanitizer ready to be shipped. Eight Oaks Farm Distillery

“We plan to push product out to these groups as soon as possible in addition to sharing the sanitizer with other non-profits and organizations including firefighters, police, and EMS workers,” Butters says.

Eight Oaks hopes to move forward with producing a spray sanitizer to clean surfaces, too.

The distillery is taking donations to support their production efforts—you can donate here .

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