BRADENTON – Bradenton’s Motorworks Brewing and Tampa’s Dark Door Spirits are stepping up to help the community sanitize.
“Normally we make whiskey’s and we were making a collaborate whiskey, where we were distilling some of their beer into a whiskey and Motorworks, reached out and said hey can we switch production of that and start making hand sanitizer with it immediately and that’s exactly what we did,” said Co-Founder of Dark Door Spirits, Matt Allen.
“When the global shortage happened on hand sanitizer, the FDA allowed consumer-based distillation places to actually turn consumer-grade alcohol into sanitizer so we quickly deviated the high proof alcohol that was coming from the beer that we were distilling down to make it into hand sanitizer,” said Director of Sales and Marketing at Motorworks Brewing, Barry Elwonger.
Elwonger says it typically takes 14 days for their beer to ferment all the way out, and once the beer is fermented they can distill beer into a high proof alcohol in about 11 hours.
“From there they’ll mix that with glycerin and with a low percent of hydrogen peroxide and that combined will become hand sanitizer,” said Elwonger.
Both Dark Door Spirits and Motorworks Brewing have willingly shifted their production and resources to produce hand sanitizer for the general public
“We knew that there was a shortage for this, first responders, medical facilities, hospitals, nursing homes, what have you,” said Elwonger. “No one is able to find hand sanitizer right now and it’s critical for us to get past this disease and to actually stop the virus we knew that we needed to do something. A by creating this swiftly we were able to, well we’re hoping that we can help deter the pandemic from continuing.”
Both businesses are dropping off hand sanitizer to nursing homes and first responders, including, Bradenton Police Department.
“What a fantastic idea we first heard of this on social media, we were hoping and praying that we were going to be some of the recipients,” said Chief of Police of Bradenton Police Department, Melanie Bevan.
“This is a time when we all have to come together as a community, Motorworks certainly stepped up and showed us that they’re willing to do that,” said Bevan.
If you are interested in donating to help both businesses buy supplies for the production of the sanitizer, you can reach out to Motorworks Brewing at cheers@motorworksbrewing.com
