Hand Sanitizer Recipe for Distilleries

Update 3/14/2020: FDA is now recommending 80% ABV for ethyl alcohol based sanitizers. We will be updating our recipe immediately (Sunday, March 15, 2020).

Hi everyone. Here is a collection of recipe ideas for making hand sanitizer from GNS for distilleries.

We’ve seen other distilleries talking about using heads for making sanitizer. While this is probably a fine idea for sanitizing non-porous non-coated surfaces, it’s not smart to use on human skin. Methanol is bad for us, which is why we remove it in the first place, right?

Anyhow, here are our recipe ideas…

Hand sanitizer is simply alcohol + emollient (skin softener).

First, here’s a good explanation of how alcohol mixes with oils.

And here is what we’ve done:

10 Liters of GNS at 95% ABV
2 Liters of mineral oil
1.5 liters of RO water (any water would work)

You need to shake this up pretty good for it to dissolve. And unfortunately, it does come out of solution. We recommend you tell your guests to shake it up before using to redistribute the oil.

The basic recipe is 10L of GNS with 3.5L of some kind of emollient. This nets 14.5L of hand sanitizer at 70% ABV.

Aloe is pretty expensive, and was unavailable in Bloomington. The general point of the post is that you can use any emollient, just make use of what is available to you. And while 60% is a good target, better to err on the side of more ABV and target 70% in case of measurement errors.

So if you have propylene glycol, you could use that:

10 Liters of GNS at 95% ABV
2 Liters of Propylene Glycol
1.5 liters of RO water

If you happen to have a bunch of coconut oil:

10 Liters of GNS at 95% ABV
2 Liters of Coconut Oil
1.5 liters of RO water

If you happen to have glycerin:

10 Liters of GNS at 95% ABV
2 Liters of Glycerin
1.5 liters of RO water

Let us know if you have other suggestions on our Facebook page.

Stay clean, stay safe, and stay in business!