This Distiller Pivoted His Business to Make Hand Sanitizer for Front Line Workers
This article originally appeared in the December 2020 issue of Men's Health.
WE COULD all use a good cocktail due to [gestures at world].
Master distiller Yuseff Cherney, co-founder of Cutwater Spirits in San Diego, CA, knows a thing or two about high-quality libations.
But he learned even more about focus and flexibility as he pivoted distillery operations to manufacture hand sanitizer for front line workers during the pandemic.
A lot of the stuff that we do, we have it lined up at least a year in advance. We became partners with the Padres, and we designed a can for Opening Day, which came and went. One of the big things we had going into 2020 was the expectation that we were going to do a lot of business with venues: concert venues; stadiums; and large arena-focused events. And that kind of disappeared, which is a huge part of our revenue stream for the year.
We saw the immediate need for hand sanitizer. The first few weeks of the crisis, everyone panic-bought up all the product that was out there. As a matter of distillation, part of our business is handling high-proof alcohol. We’re set up for it.
The hardest part about it, oddly enough, was getting bottles. Everyone was scrambling to bottle hand sanitizer and at one point we were looking at maybe putting it in the little honey-bear bottles because we couldn’t get anything else. Ultimately, we donated around 20,000 bottles.
We made it so that the San Diego Food Bank would be our main distribution point. We’d have first responders tell us [about] interacting with people, not knowing what level of exposure they had, and just the peace of mind they had from always having sanitizer at the ready. Once you hear that part from workers on the front lines of this, it’s hard to not want to produce as much of this as you can.
If anything, [the pandemic] spurred us here at work to try and make some more complex things that up until this point, we hadn’t really gotten into. Now we’re thinking, “Well, when I was going to the bars, I’d actually order a mango margarita.” So let’s get into that now. Or White Russians have been a really tough one for us to come up with because of the creamy aspect. So let’s take the time now to really make this White Russian.
We sit in a lab and we make these things up. We’re able to hunker down and focus on things. As people are sitting at home, they might be questioning and looking a little deeper at, “What am I drinking here?” Maybe pre-pandemic they were just grabbing and rolling with it. But now there’s a little extra time to get on the internet, do some research, check out our Instagram, and get to know us a little bit better.
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