What started out with three Hamilton hospitality blokes deciding to do a ‘good’ turn has snowballed into a lifesaving brew.
In the midst of the impending Covid-19 crisis Good George Brewing founders Brian Watson, Darrel Hadley and Jason Macklow, searching for hand sanitiser for their 300 or so staff, noticed that a whisky brewer in Scotland was using its still to produce it.
“I checked the World Health Organisation website for an approved recipe and thought, we can do this,” says Brian. “We thought this is a good idea – a way of helping people out at this time and keeping our staff, family and friends safe, so we decided to fire up the still.”
Within 24 hours of their first Facebook post the idea had taken off and a few days later they had labels printed ready to go.
Good George had been on track to produce 1.5 million litres of beer and cider this year. Quite unselfishly, the company instead turned all of its part-brewed whisky, gin and barrel-aged beer – hundreds of litres, into hand sanitiser.
“We figured that right now the world needs hand sanitiser more than whisky and gin,” says Brian.
The company gave away the first 1100 bottles to its staff, families and friends with the rest reserved for those with compromised health, emergency workers and those on the frontline.
Then it “got crazy”, says Brian. “We had the NZ Defence Force and Prison Service contact us wanting heaps, so I said, ‘we better keep going boys’!”
Renowned for their beer and cider and a dozen bars restaurants and partner bars, Brian confesses that at first they knew nothing about making hand sanitiser.
Always on the look-out for ways to serve the community, especially through Good George’s ‘Be Good, Do Good Charity, they figured if this was what they had to do to keep people safe then they’d do it.
The switch to hand sanitiser and the Government’s wage subsidy scheme had enabled them to keep on all 300 or so of their staff, with 20 or 30 brewing and making sanitiser. “We’re trying to pay them without reducing their wages and we still have some staff on full salary,” says Brian.
Up until early in the lockdown every bottle of hand sanitiser they made was given away. “We’re still struggling to survive. We have to pay our staff so we’re now offering deals of hand sanitiser and beer,” he says.
With 80 percent of Good George’s business ceasing to exist due to the crisis, their story is a wonderful example of Kiwi ingenuity.
“We didn’t know a thing about hand sanitiser, but we learned fast and used what we had to create a quality product,” says Brian. The WHO recipe is simple to make. “We have a still on site so we can make small batches of high octane ethanol which is a key ingredient for the product. Anyone with a still should be able to make sanitiser,” he says.
