New York City’s hospitality industry has been decimated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Bars have been shuttered. Most restaurant staff have been laid off. But local distilleries are still up and running, producing the most Brooklyn of all medical products: small-batch artisanal hand sanitizer in glass flasks.

“I never thought in my life that I’d be in the hand sanitizer business,” says Stephen DeAngelo, founder of Greenhook Ginsmiths in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

In just a few short months, COVID-19 has rapidly spread across the globe, infecting hundreds of thousands and bringing major cities to a standstill. With each wave of bad news, droves of Americans rushed to stores, creating shortages of products like hand sanitizer, toilet paper, disinfectant wipes, and face masks.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump invoked the Defense Production Act, which allows the government to force American industry to produce medical supplies that are needed to fight COVID-19. That same afternoon, the Alcohol, Tobacco, Trade and Tax Bureau (TTB) issued an advisory that distilleries would now be legally allowed to produce hand sanitizer, tax-free. Brooklyn’s distilleries leapt into action.

“I don’t think the future is too bright for gin right now,” says DeAngelo who, like most distillers, relies on restaurants and bars for a large percentage of his sales. “This helps to keep my staff busy at this time, and we’re doing a lot of good for the hospitals as well.”

Greenhook Ginsmiths already has two orders from hospitals, for 2,500 gallons and 1,700 gallons of hand sanitizer, respectively. Some distilleries are giving it away for free, while others are asking for small donations to cover costs.

St. Agrestis Spirits, which focuses on bottled cocktails but uses its base gin to produce hand sanitizer, has been including a bottle of artisanal hand sanitizer with every order, which started on Tuesday after the state relaxed laws on booze-to-go. The distillery has partnered with Greenhook Ginsmith on deliveries.

“Delivery is keeping us alive right now,” says St. Agrestis founder Louis Catizone.

Although there are several online guides to making your own hand sanitizer at home using Tito’s Vodka or another retail product, they’re all ineffective. The World Health Organization calls for hand sanitizers to be at least 60 percent alcohol, which means starting out with a distillate that’s closer to 90 percent before mixing it with glycerin or aloe vera gel (Tito’s is 40 percent).

“Everclear is what I would tell them to use,” says New York Distilling Company’s Bill Potter when asked about at-home production of hand sanitizer. “There isn’t a whole lot of alcohol on the market that is higher than 60 percent, and Everclear is one of the few that are.”

Potter himself uses a 87 percent alcohol that is “perfectly good gin that is a little bit old, and doesn’t taste the way we want it to.” As a result, his hand sanitizer smells a little bit like Christmas, which is characteristic of the juniper berries used in the distillation of gin.

“Juniper berries have always had a reputation for medicine,” says Potter. “It has been used since the Ancient Greeks for things such as an upset stomach. Juniper also has a very long history as being antiseptic, and having antimicrobial properties.”

For each handmade batch, Potter mixes 450ml of gin with 200ml of gel, creating a 60 percent alcoholic hand sanitizer that he’s been giving to customers and staff in 200ml glass flasks. Potter says that he has the capacity to produce over 1,400 bottles of hand sanitizer with just the extra high proof distillate that he already has sitting around.

“The distillery is very interested in making larger quantities of hand sanitizer as a public service for our community,” says Potter.

While gin producers like Greenhook, St. Agrestis, and New York Distilling Co. have an easier time getting into hand sanitizer production because they start with an extremely high proof and purer ethanol base spirit, even a whiskey producer is joining the effort.

Kings County Distillery, which normally produces bourbon and moonshine at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, is changing its production process by adding a third distillation, which further removes flavor and impurities from the alcohol and makes it high enough proof to turn into hand sanitizer.

“All the alcohol that we have is going to end up as hand sanitizer,” says Colin Spoelman, co-founder and head distiller at Kings County Distillery. Their first run is a thousand 200ml flasks, with enough supplies already in house to make up to 4,000 bottles.

Spoelman plans to give the hand sanitizer away on site, with a suggested donation of $5 to cover the cost of raw goods and production. Though all of these distilleries stand to make more money selling booze (“We’re post-math at this point,” said Spoelman), they see the production of hand sanitizer as something of a public service.

“We’re going to keep making and giving out free hand sanitizer until someone tells us to stop,” says Catizone.

Gary He is a photojournalist based in New York City.

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