We’ve been getting a lot of questions about our recent decision to start making and donating surface sanitizer to the Gunnison County institutions and groups responding to COVID-19.

As a certified B Corp, we believe it’s our duty and responsibility to do what we can to help our community navigate this challenging and uncertain time. We’re glad we have the ability to support our community and will continue to look for ways to do so, but we never want to take the spotlight off of those who are doing the most important work: doctors, nurses, first responders and other healthcare workers and volunteers who are staffing the front lines. We are so grateful for their tireless efforts!

What We’re Making

We’re using the alcohol “heads” from our existing distillation process to make an antiviral surface cleaner and alcohol spray. These heads are a routine product of distillation but never go into a barrel to age because they don’t possess the properties we’re looking for in rum. They contain mostly ethanol as well as 1-5 ppm each of methanol and isopropyl.

The end product is 62% alcohol, which is the lowest alcohol content we can make and still have it be effective against the coronavirus. We do not add hydrogen peroxide or glycerine (they are not readily available and only added for skin applications). Our product is meant only as a surface cleaner. This is not a hand sanitizer.

Who We’re Making it For

We started making this cleaner when we learned that local institutions on the front lines of the COVID-19 response needed surface sanitizer—places and groups like the local hospital, senior care center, doctors’ offices, EMS, testing sites, law enforcement, and other groups helping to respond.

This product is not available to the general public, and at this time it is only available within Gunnison County. Our community is a hot spot for COVID-19 with one of the highest case rates in the US. Donating this sanitizer is one small way we can support the institutions, health professionals and first responders doing the real work of containing the spread.

We also feel it’s important to acknowledge that this product is flammable, is not potable (drinkable) and is not intended for use on human skin. While we have worked with Gunnison County to ensure that it meets county safety standards, it is important to keep this product out of the hands of anyone who might hoard or misuse it.

Our founder Karen is currently working with the Gunnison County Incident Command Center to distribute the sanitizer—in other words, we are not deciding who receives it but working with the command team to make it available to those who need it most.

If you are a local institution or group interested in acquiring some surface sanitizer, please contact the Incident Command Center or Karen by email at karen@montanyadistillers.com. (Please do not direct media inquiries to Karen at this time—you’ll receive a much quicker response from our PR Manager Jenny Foust.)

Why We’re Making Surface Sanitizer and Not Hand Sanitizer

We feel comfortable making surface sanitizer because organizations and groups like the TTB (Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau), FDA (Federal Drug Administration) and WHO (World Health Administration) have recently started providing guidelines on how to do so.

We’re able to follow those guidelines and make a surface sanitizer using a natural byproduct of our existing distillation process. We also have the necessary permits and approvals to produce the alcohol in this product. The same cannot be said for making a compounded hand sanitizer.

WHO recipes for hand sanitizer call for a higher percent alcohol than we can distill (96% ABV), and also call for chemical processes to which we aren’t accustomed or set up to do, such as denaturing or compounding. We also have concerns about the effectiveness of hand sanitizers as well as their effect on human skin. If companies solely focused on making these types of products (aka Purell) are facing challenges to their health claims, we certainly don’t feel it’s something we can solve.

As we said above, we’re reserving the sanitizer for Gunnison County institutions and groups responding to COVID-19. These groups can either contact the county’s incident command team or Karen at karen@montanyadistllers.com for information on how to obtain it.