April 1, 2020 — With entire sectors of the economy shuttered and employees furloughed, small business owners are looking for new ways to use what they have on hand. That’s what Crispin Cain, president of Tamar Distillery in Redwood Valley, is doing with the organic and GMO-free grains he originally assembled to make high-quality gin.
When the market for spirits plummeted and his workers all went home, he began to look into using his distilled spirits (mostly ethanol) to make hand sanitizer. But the ingredients for that particular commodity — from hydrogen peroxide to bottles for the end product — were suddenly unavailable or a lot more expensive than they used to be.
As Cain was wading through the details of the new market, he got a call from Miles Pepper, an old friend who had set up an online network called Disinfect Connect, where volunteers match up medical providers who are running low on sanitation supplies with people who are making them. It’s kind of like a dating app, for fighting the pandemic. And Cain is at it by himself, bottling some of the 760 gallons of alcohol he has in inventory to make disinfectant. Producing more, he said, would take “some doing,” since his workers haven’t been in for two weeks.
Tamar Distillery has five employees, including Cain. At this time of year, he’d have five or six temporary workers in as well, to help with bottling. “I have raw materials on hand to make whiskey,” he said. “I’d be preparing that right now and getting it fermenting, so I can distill. And I have both bourbon and gin that need bottling. I’d have all those people in working right now. And they’re not.”
Distilling is agricultural work, which is allowed to continue in Mendocino County, but customers can only buy the bottles online and at some grocery stores. The social venues, where people usually gather to buy drinks, are all shut down for the duration of the shelter in place order, which has no set end date.
And that’s the thing about whiskey and gin and rosebud liqueur: it’s all social. You’re supposed to pass a bottle around and smell it and raise a glass and clink it against someone else’s glass and hang out, generally in close proximity to several other people. All those activities are now considered potentially deadly, which takes a considerable amount of fun out of having a drink.
Still, Cain likes to give tours of his facility: a big warehouse that smells like finely processed spirits evaporating through the staves of the oak barrels they’re aging in. It smells like cold air, with an occasional whiff of springtime wafting in through a metal door that kept blowing open and slamming shut. We took that tour, trailing along at a great distance with our separate microphones, long cords, and disinfectant.
We paused in front of a column still from Germany, which is what the freshly made disinfectant went through before it headed down the road to a nursing home in Sebastopol. It looks like something you might see in a medieval alchemy lab, or a cartoon of an inventor’s cheerfully weird gadgetry: all copper tubes and dials and something that looks like an onion dome on top of a big pot with a spigot.
Really, though, the column still not quite like anything else, other than all the hard work that goes into making one small thing to fight something deadly and vast. “You ferment something and you recover about one gallon for every eight or ten in spirits,” Cain reflected. “There’s a lot of work that goes into this. It’s kind of an amazing thing.”