MEDINA, Ohio - For the owners of BKO Distillery, shifting gears in a crisis is nothing new.
Ken Obloy and Brad Kochmit battled multiple delays, a wall of bureaucracy, mountains of paperwork and other challenges to get their business up and running in February.
"Now you add global pandemic," Obloy said.
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The business partners, who make Vodka, are creating hand sanitizer, which they are giving away for free. It grew from news reports of the product's shortage.
"All I can see is yelling and complaining and screaming and whatever, and news reports on gouging and hoarding," Obloy said. "We looked at each other. 'We make alcohol. We can do that.' "
The transformation was fairly painless. During distillation alcohol is separated - it’s an involved, technical process that involves several steps - but the principle is what's important.
"When we produce alcohol we produce many types of alcohol other than ethanol," Obloy said. "Any alcoholic solution over 70 percent concentration will work to disinfect." Their version is 75 percent alcohol.
"It’s not really hand sanitizer. Hand sanitizer has moisturizer. This is a disinfectant solution to wipe down surfaces." (He's right. Some hand sanitizers have Tahitian palm milk or other moisturizers among their ingredients.)
They raced to Dollar Tree and bought as many plastic bottles as they could. Their tasting room is open for carryout for people who want to buy their $25 bottles of Voudoux Vodka, but as soon as word got out they began cleaning up - of course - with their hand-sanitizer business.
"The Post Office in Medina called," Obloy said. " ' We can't find wipes, nothing. Can you help?' "
Then, he said, the floodgates really opened.
"I had no idea for the demand. Post offices, police, fire departments - they're all coming in in droves because no one has this stuff. It's spun out of control."
Obloy and Kochmit have filled about 1,000 bottles in less than a week in their Medina Road facility. They are working 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day. They have doled out 80-milliliter bottles in addition to larger spray bottles and even gallon containers for Post Offices, Medina County Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security and others. And it's on the honor system. People can get one or two, but "if you are a nurse I give as much as I can," Obloy said.
"The feel-good part of this is we're buying these little bottles and people started donating to buy more bottles to give it away," he said.
Their business plan just changed drastically, taking on a new, benevolent direction that "just fell into our laps," Obloy said.
"We're getting masses and masses of people who need sanitizer," he said. "I know it was an issue, but man you don’t know how much of an issue until you see it firsthand."
And in an odd twist of fate and irony, the Alcohol Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau - the agency heavily involved in the production and distribution of anything alcoholic - actually is encouraging what BKO Distillery is doing, Obloy said.
Obloy and Kochmit are gregarious fellows who roll with the punches. Obloy paraphrases a quote from Thomas Jefferson, who once said "… we must lead where we can, follow where we cannot, and still go with them, watching always the favorable moment for helping them to another step."
But he also simplifies what the two are doing.
“We’re all just trying,” he said.