- November 23, 2024
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On any given day, employees of Siesta Key Rum can be found mixing alcohol and oils and bottling the liquid for distribution.
But it’s nothing you’d mix with Coke or a tropical fruit juice. They recently have taken on a new endeavor: making hand sanitizer.
As businesses began to shut down, and the number of positive coronavirus cases in the county grew, employees at the distillery began looking for ways they could help, Owner Troy Roberts said.
Because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends using alcohol-based hand sanitizer that contains more than 60% ethanol or 70% isopropanol, creating hand sanitizers in lieu of rum seemed like a no-brainer.
“It’s the right thing to do,” Roberts said. “Everybody needs to do their part, and it was just such a cool and obvious idea for us, so we just joined in with all the other small distilleries around the country and started making sanitizer.”
After they decided to make the sanitizers, Roberts said the employees, including his son, Wyatt, who is a lead distiller, started researching the proper way to make it.
They had to make sure they were making the sanitizer legally because the Food and Drug Administration and the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau created guidelines for distilleries to follow.
They follow a recipe from the World Health Organization that is TTB approved.
Roberts said employees at Sarasota Memorial Hospital also tested the sanitizer to make sure it would kill viruses.
Once the employees learned how to make it, they began acquiring the ingredients, which got increasingly more difficult day by day, Roberts said.
“There’s only three ingredients, but getting the ingredients besides the rum has been a challenge,” he said. “Even just getting the bottles to put them in has been a challenge. And of course, the prices on this stuff has just gone through the roof.”
So far, Roberts estimates the company has put about $15,000 into producing the hand sanitizers. At the same time, the distillery is losing about six figures in sales a month, Roberts said.
However, Roberts said the employees still want to give back to the community, which is something they regularly do with their sea life series. Portions of the sales from that series are given to Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium.
“We’re in a pretty decent position compared to a lot of businesses these days because we have two parts to our business,” Roberts said. “We have the tasting room, where we normally have the biggest margins, but we also have distribution, where we have sales going through liquor stores.”
The distillery is still producing rum, but after an executive order from Gov. Ron DeSantis shut down the company’s tasting room, the company doesn’t have as great of a need for the alcohol.
“We don’t have to make as much rum as we normally would during this peak time of year,” Roberts said. “But the good news is we have extra rum to turn into sanitizer.”
After the sanitizer was created, employees bottled it into gallon jugs, 16-ounce bottles and 8-ounce bottles and began donating it to those on the frontlines.
One such organization was the Sarasota Police Department, which received several gallon jugs.
“It was so nice to receive that,” Chief Bernadette DiPino said. “We put hand sanitizer at strategic locations throughout the building and in each patrol vehicle, so it was a big help.”
The group is starting to make its second batch, but it still has several 8-ounce bottles it would like to give away to the general public, though Roberts is still brainstorming ways to safely do so.
“It’s been pretty cool to be able to do this,” Roberts said. “It’s nothing compared to what the doctors and nurses and all the first responders are doing out there. It’s a pretty small piece of the puzzle, but everybody should do their part.”
