KENTUCKY — When the world seemed to stop last spring, the bottling line at Kentucky Artisan Distillery in Oldham County stopped as well.
President and founder Stephen Thompson sent his workers home to avoid spreading the virus in the building. But in the uncertainty came an idea.
"Immediately, you realize that, 'Hey, we have what it takes to make hand sanitizer,'" he said in a February interview with Spectrum News 1 at the distillery.
Kentucky Artisan was not alone. As liquor producers, the commonwealth's distillers either had on-site or easy access to the base ingredients for hand sanitizer — namely, alcohol.
According to the Kentucky Distillers' Association, 27 of its member companies made sanitizer in 2020; led by smaller, craft operations and followed shortly thereafter by brands known around the world.
Kentucky Artisan produces Jefferson's Reserve bourbon, which can be found in liquor stores 1,000 miles from Oldham County. But Thompson describes his distillery — set on a back road in a modest warehouse — as a "boutique" operation: Too big to be considered a craft startup; too small to compete with the Brown-Formans and Sazeracs of the world.
Therefore, he kept his sites set locally when it came to producing sanitizer.
"We made a swap of buckets outside a Speedway parking lot to give to [the county,]" he laughed when recalling some of his charitable transactions.
At the distillers' association in March and April, the calls for help poured in.
"Daily, we were just getting hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these requests," said KDA spokesperson Colleen Thomas in an interview with Spectrum News 1. "The need was that dire."
Thomas said Kentucky distillers manufactured about 521,000 gallons of sanitizer in 2020. Of that amount, about 140,000 gallons were donated.
The sanitizer that was sold, Thomas said, came largely from small distilleries that used the money to keep their businesses afloat while spirit production was slowed or shut down and tourism ground to a halt.
Thompson said they gave away 10,000 cases of sanitizer for free.
"These are our customers that basically get sick, so to speak, you know? And, so, I think that it was a wartime effort – everybody got into it, you know? What can we do?"
He added that, aside from small bottles currently on sale in the gift shop, the only attempt at sales came after an order placed by "a large company" in Louisville that initially placed a bulk order, only to drop out at the last minute after much of the product had already been made. Thompson refused to name the company, instead joking that they now "have 800 cases of this that we would love to find a home for at a very low price."
For weeks last spring, while bourbon production ceased, Julie Cox and two of her favorite employees were the only ones on the floor at Kentucky Artisan,
"I’ve got two boys that are over 18, and they came in and helped since we were from the same household," she said after her lunch break one February afternoon.
The family filled bottles of any shape and size the business could find - even using buckets from hardware stores when necessary.
The bourbon bottling line has been back up and running at Kentucky Artisan since early last summer. But the memories — good and bad — will remain for Kentucky’s distillers.
"I’m glad we could be a part of it – helping," Cox said. "Because so much of it you feel helpless about, that you don’t have any control over. And that was just one little minute part of the whole year, but I’m glad we could do it."
While their own industry suffered at the hands of the virus, their people worked to help others.