MUSC asks Charleston-area distilleries for sanitizer-grade alcohol as pandemic continues

By Dave Infante dinfante@postandcourier.com | Mar 23, 2020

As Charlestonians ordered their wine bottles and beer growlers to-go this weekend to comply with coronavirus pandemic precautions, the Medical University of South Carolina made a higher-proof takeout request of its own: Bucketloads of neutral grain spirit, from any local distillery that could provide it. “

We (asked) some of our pharmacy residents (to) reach out to some of our local distillers,” says Jason Mills, MUSC’s pharmacy supply chain manager. “We actually have a need for high-proof ethanol so that we can make our own hand sanitizer, given the current circumstances and the inability to procure it.”

Commercially-produced sanitizing products have been in limited supply in the US since shortly after the pandemic began. Across the country, distilleries have earned goodwill and retweets aplenty for churning out makeshift hand sanitizer to help their communities reduce transmission of the COVID-19 virus.

The American Craft Spirits Association last week published guidelines on its website to aid its constituents in producing hand sanitizer up to the specifications of the Food and Drug Administration and the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. 

Those efforts are focused on getting more sanitizer into the hands of the general public—a worthy goal, but one that doesn’t help healthcare institutions trying to procure bulk quantities of the lifesaving solution to distribute to the healthcare professionals on the frontlines.

“Our hospital administrators and leaders are really pushing pharmacy and nursing and everybody else to really start to think outside the box and come up with some really good viable solutions,” said Mills.

Following an intense week spent grappling with the impact of the pandemic, MUSC’s stores of commercially produced hand sanitizer remain at appropriate levels, he said.

But to preempt any potential shortages, compounding pharmacists for the hospital system formulated a from-scratch recipe to produce the disinfectant in bulk.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention recommends hand sanitizers that are at leas 60 percent alcohol, which can come from a base of grain neutral spirit, or GNS. For MUSC’s formula, “I think minimum criteria would be at least 70 percent (alcohol by volume), but the higher the better,” said Mills. 

Of over half a dozen local distilleries that pharmacists contacted about GNS, the first to respond was Traxler Littlejohn of North Charleston’s Nippitaty Distillery. Since last week, he’d been mixing GNS with water to produce a proofed-down sanitizing solution to give to friends and neighbors in Park Circle. Then MUSC called.

“They contacted me and I said, ‘well yeah, I can set aside 40 gallons for you,’” he said. 

Because Nippitaty is a small operation, and Littlejohn its only employee, he does not distill straight from grain. Instead, he buys GNS in 55-gallon barrels as a base for his spirits, then adds botanicals and redistills the product.

Though Nippitaty’s liquors are made with an organic version of the spirit, Littlejohn tests recipes using commodity GNS, and he had some left over. 

“So I had this extra GNS that I used to develop my flavored vodka last summer, and I was like, ’Well, it ain’t doing me any good sitting around here,” he said. 

Federal regulations prohibit distilleries from selling the solution, so Nippitaty will donate it to the hospital, added Littlejohn. 

“If I can give them something to help out their process, and all it cost me is paying taxes on the stuff that I’m using, I’ll go ahead and do it, man,” he said. “That’s what we should do.”

On Monday, workers for MUSC collected the GNS solution from Nippitaty’s facility off Azalea Drive, decanting the clear spirit from the larger drums into buckets. From there, MUSC’s compounding pharmacy coordinator Eddie Bostick and his colleagues will follow a Food and Drug Administration-approved formula to mix the spirit with anhydrous gel to create a house-made sanitizer for internal use. 

Production on the in-house sanitizer could start as early as next week, said Mills.

“There’s not going to be a fragrance, it’s going to be purely utilitarian,” said Mills. But it will serve a critical function as MUSC gears up for another week of coronavirus treatment, shoring up the hospital’s reserves of sanitizer so it can commit stores of its 200-proof pure ethyl alcohol for other sanitizing usages, like sterilizing personal protection equipment. 

“Getting alcohol from a distillery “allows us to reserve some of the more ‘high-test’” solvent for other essential applications, explained Mills.

As for the 79 percent GNS solution it received from the distillery: “We can make 40 gallons go a long way,” he said.