Distillery cleans up for staff on frontline

Popular Perth-based Whipper Snapper Distillery has stopped making whiskey and instead joined the mission to help make more hand sanitiser in the fight against COVID-19. Co-founded by Narrogin’s Jimmy McKeown, the distillery had been inundated with calls to help fill a shortfall in ethanol, which is needed to make hand sanitiser. Mr McKeown said it was something they had to do for the community. “We saw other distillers over east start producing it, branding it up and taking advantage of the situation and that was something we didn’t want to do,” he said. “But when demand came out from frontline workers, that’s where we thought we could make a difference. “One reason we’re not branding it up for the public is it’s for people that actually need it.” The East Perth distillery is producing 2000L of hand sanitiser each week, with the first batch sent to the frontline last week. “It’s certainly been a quick change to transition our business from making small-batch premium whiskey to hand sanitiser,” Mr McKeown said. “The demand for sanitiser is huge and we can see that demand of 2000L of sanitiser each week continuing for the next couple of months. We’ve got orders up to 10,000L to 15,000L as of Monday and we’re still getting hit up.” According to Whipper Snapper’s head distiller, the process of making ethanol for the sanitiser is quite different to making whiskey. “We source local WA grain to make whiskey. To make alcohol from grain, it’s quite a premium way of doing it, but to make whiskey you have to do it with grain, which we source from Narrogin,” Mr McKeown said. “Unfortunately, there’s no way of getting those grain needs met and creating a large amount of alcohol in such short time, so the quickest way to do that is through wine. Ferngrove Wines have 200,000L of wine set aside for us to distil over the next months and are supplying 15,000L a week.” The hand sanitiser is being bottled up at Whipper Snapper before it is passed on to Labwest, where it is organised for distribution out to the COVID-19 frontline. Mr McKeown said there was no real craft to making sanitiser — it was more about science. “We take the wine, which is already fermented and alcoholic and put it into the still, which is a special still not designed for sanitiser but can still do the job,” he said. “We boil off the alcohol and basically isolate the ethanol chemical, so it’s nice and clean and pure to WHO standards and then we water it down and add hydrogen peroxide and glycerine.” The process is supervised by a Labwest chemist before hundreds of bottles are filled each day. “While it is a boring product, it is keeping us afloat at the moment,” Mr McKeown said. “It’s keeping all our cafe staff employed and keeping the lights on at the distillery. “COVID-19 impacted our business before we started doing sanitiser. When new restrictions came in, we had to cancel our masterclass tours because they were large gatherings, our cafe was takeaway only and all the trade shows and markets we get along to got cancelled.” Whipper Snapper Distillery plans to sell leftover stocks to the public once critical services have enough supplies. “We get a lot of emails from people wanting it for personal reasons but on the priority list, they’re low down compared to emergency services,” Mr McKeown said. “So, once we got them sorted, hopefully we can sell some to the public as well.”