A gin distillery in Australia has issued a recall after it accidentally shipped gin bottles containing hand sanitizer, according to the Apollo Bay Distillery outside Melbourne. The gin distillery had previously converted some of its facility to hand sanitiser production to help combat the coronavirus pandemic.
“The product is labelled as gin, however it is not gin,” the company said in a statement published to Facebook. “The bottles are not correctly sealed, they can be identified as having no shrink wrap seal.”
Countless alcohol distilleries around the world started churning out hand sanitiser back in February and March as the coronavirus pandemic started to take hold all around the world. But Apollo Bay seems to have messed up, sending out hand sanitiser in its “SS Casino Gin” bottles. The SS Casino was a ship that sunk off the coast of Australia in 1932.
The product was sold at the Great Ocean Road Brewhouse from Friday June 5 until the evening of Sunday June 7, according to the distillery. The bottles contain 1.45 per cent glycerol and 0.125 per cent hydrogen peroxide, which won’t kill you if consumed, but can cause nausea, headaches, dizziness, vomiting, and diarrhoea.
Australia has done relatively well managing the covid-19 pandemic, with just 7,267 cases and 102 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tracker. Today, in fact, was the first day in months that the country recorded no new cases of community transmission, according to local health authorities. The U.S., by contrast, has the highest number of cases in the world, with over 1.9 million identified cases and over 111,000 deaths.
Australia, of course, has a much smaller number of people than the U.S., with the entire country roughly the population size of Texas. But Texas still has a much worse pandemic than Australia, with over 76,000 identified cases and 1,830 deaths in the Lone Star state.
Anyone who purchased the bottles during that period is encouraged to contact the distillery at info@apollobaydistillery.com.au for a refund or a replacement bottle of gin. But maybe the company should consider shipping some of those special gin bottles to the Republican National Committee in the U.S. as an act of goodwill. U.S. President Trump previously suggested that people should drink disinfectant, something that all good Trumpian patriots should seriously consider in these trying times.
And if your stomach is too squeamish for bleach, why not go to a neo-fascist Trump rally? We hear they’re starting back up in a couple of weeks. It’s the least any Trump supporter can do.