Pasadena Distillery Puts Its Talents and Tanks Brewing Hand Sanitizer, Straight Up

It seems like such a long time ago, but way back in early spring, as the Coronavirus pandemic was first circling the globe, American shoppers began to swoop up paper towels, toilet paper, and hand sanitizer, as if the world would run out the following week.

As things slowly returned to the new normal, simple American ingenuity rose to the fore. Smaller independent businesses, especially distilleries, realized that they obviously could not create toilet paper in their factories, but with the right ingredients, they could formulate hand sanitizer.

“When the world was closing, and all the tastings ceased, it was a big hit to take for all these small distilleries,” recalled Karen Stark, who with her husband Greg, owns Stark Spirits, a boutique gin and whiskey distillery in Pasadena.

As she recalled in a recent interview, “Some wonderful people in the Midwest, I think, started using their alcohol to make sanitizer and distributing it to first responders. And so it just kind of came through the craft spirits industry that we could do that.”

She continued, “Greg and I decided, ‘Well, yes, we’ll do that.’ We make a gin and an Aquavit, both of which are based on what’s called neutral grain spirits, and neutral grain spirits are the basis for the World Health Organization’s Formula Number One, the world’s recognized hand sanitizer formula.”

But it wasn’t that simple. As a distillery, Stark wasn’t licensed to produce non-beverage alcohol, so they first had to obtain a waiver from the state Tax and Trade Bureau, granted only for the production of the World Health Organization’s No. 1 formula. The distillery then had to be registered with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and comply with the modified Department of Transportation regulations for transporting the volatile liquid.

And it takes a few more ingredients to turn the 80% ethanol that Starks creates into hand sanitizer, Stark explained.

But, she notes, the point of creating a good hand sanitizer is to create a substance with the disinfecting qualities of alcohol, but not something that anyone would ever want to drink.

So the Starks place what are known as bittering agents into the formula. So bitter and caustic in fact, that even getting a little of the undiluted agents on your skin would be painful. But added to the formula of ethanol, hydrogen peroxide glycerin, and the bittering agents, the gel does its job while being undrinkable.

Stark noted that the distillery received a number of large orders from first-responder organizations at first, as well as from residential care facilities.

“We don’t really advertise,” she said, “but word got around.”

But let’s be real. Stark Spirits are in the distillery business, not the sanitizer business. And no one is getting rich.

As Stark said recently, “Actually, Purell being sold in Costco costs almost twice as much as we charge for the same amount … we did not want to take advantage of people’s fears and vulnerability.”

As Stark stresses, “We look forward to the end of the need for copious amounts of hand sanitizer and are anxious to return to what we love to do, creating Stark Spirits premium spirits.”