Acre Distillery
There was a time when the tasting room at Acre Distilling looked a little more like a warehouse, stacked with boxes of bottles, labels, and gallons of alcohol. But the downtown Fort Worth distillery wasn’t making whiskey; it was making hand sanitizer.
“I had a grand plan for this whole year,” Acre owner Tony Formby says. “We had planned out all these events … but [due to the COVID-19 pandemic] my whole plan went out the window.”
Acre was like many other distilleries around the country that began producing hand sanitizer in response to COVID-19. Over the spring and summer, Arlington-based Ricca Chemical would bring 270-gallon containers of isopropyl alcohol to the distillery, then the employees at Acre would bottle, label, and pack each batch of sanitizer by hand. It was a simple mix of isopropyl alcohol, distilled water, glycerol, and hydrogen peroxide; but it kept everyone busy. Formby says Acre kept everyone on staff working full time from March through the end of June and also hired a few part-time workers.
“The distillery was just cardboard boxes full of empty bottles and tops and labels and all sorts of stuff,” Formby says. “Remarkably, we got up to about 2,500 a day, which surprised me.”
Another local company, Blackland Distillery in The Foundry District, created its own hand sanitizer by following a set of instructions provided by the FDA. Blackland owner Markus Kypreos says the process was fairly straightforward (Blackland’s sanitizer is a mix of ethanol, glycerin, hydrogen peroxide, and reverse osmosis water). The hard part was everything else — sourcing ingredients, bottling, labeling, and getting those labels FDA approved too.
But making hand sanitizer kept both companies afloat until tasting rooms reopened again. Acre has since discontinued production, while Blackland has simply cut back. Neither see hand sanitizer production as part of their long-term business plan.
Then again, Kypreos did register with the FDA for a permanent industrial alcohol permit — just in case.
Blackland Distillery
“That’s not the future of the business,” Kypreos says, “unless something else crazy happens. I’m not excluding it after this year.”
Acre Distilling Hand Elixir
Key ingredients:
Isopropyl alcohol
Distilled water
Glycerol
Hydrogen peroxide
Blackland Distillery Hand Sanitizer
Key ingredients:
Ethanol
Glycerin
Hydrogen peroxide
Reverse osmosis water