The coronavirus pandemic has turned our daily lives upside down, but there have been signs of something wonderful happening too; businesses and communities are coming together to join the fight.
Supporting vital research
With our team now working from home, we’ve been able to throw all we have behind Folding@Home, a ‘distributed computing project’ that is helping to combat COVID-19; and you can too.
Using idle computing power, Folding@Home combines the spare IT resources of businesses and household PC’s to help scientists run faster medical simulations and crunch data, speeding up the search for a cure – https://foldingathome.org/2020/03/10/covid19-update/.
As the world comes together to fight the coronavirus, we have devoted 100% of our new server’s processing power to support this crucial research and, whether you are a business or have a home PC, all you need to do to help is visit https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/, install the F@H program, and you can join The Lakes Distillery team (enter our team number – 251926 – during setup).
A note about Hand Sanitiser
As demand outpaces supply, there has been a raft of announcements from distilleries adapting their distillery equipment to produce hand sanitisers. With the equipment, skills and people to make alcohol, it’s a natural assumption that all distilleries can do this but, unfortunately, that is not the case.
As much as we would dearly love to help, our distillation equipment won’t allow us to make the primary reagents required for the WHO-approved formulation of hand sanitiser; ethanol (96% ABV) or isopropyl (99.8% ABV) alcohol.
The new make spirit we create for The Lakes Single Malt Whisky is not suitable for this purpose, as it not neutral and is designed to create a congeneric flavour, which gives it our unique flavour profile. The distilleries turning their hand to this are mostly using column stills to make their gin and vodka, which gives them the capability to make the high-strength, neutral spirit needed. At The Lakes, we use a traditional copper pot still to make our gin and, while it is perfectly suited to extract the maximum amount of flavour possible from our botanicals, it won’t allow us to make the desired strength of neutral spirit required for the WHO-recommended formulation, no matter how much we wish it would.
While we could buy-in all the necessary components (e.g. neutral spirit, glycerol, etc.) and assemble our own hand sanitser, in reality, we would add no additional value to the experts already doing this. Indeed, we could pull further on the vital supplies of key ingredients that are already in such short supply. That is why, instead, we are focusing our efforts on keeping as many of our team as possible safely at home and supporting the crusade to find a cure for COVID-19.
Join our team (251926) and start ‘folding’ at https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/
