Terry alum’s distillery finds the spirit in sanitizer

Craig Moore (BBA ’00) has Old Fourth Distillery responding to a need during the pandemic
Jeff and Craig Moore of Old Fourth Distillery with a batch of their sanitizer.

The coronavirus should have been noxious to a business that depends on elbows resting on bars, revelers standing closer together than six feet and marketing tours that help drive business. But Craig Moore (BBA ’00) has been an entrepreneur since he was 7 years old. He wasn’t going to allow the original sin of entrepreneurs — failure to adapt — spin him into a hole during the pandemic.

Over a weekend in early March, when the coronavirus was tipping over the hospitality industry, Moore and his brother, Jeff, took Old Fourth Distillery, a bourbon/vodka/gin maker and bar, and redeveloped their enterprise.

Instead of booze, they made bubbly … gallons and gallons of hand sanitizer with their 95 percent alcohol.

During the virus outbreak in Atlanta, they were working with a co-packer to produce 20,000 gallons of sanitizer a week for 8-ounce bottles, gallon jugs, or 5-gallon containers. It is an employee-owned business — William Broder (BSA ’14) is part of the 10-person team — and Old Fourth thrived in the downturn.

“We saw the entrepreneurial spirit of our mother (Pat),” Craig Moore said. “With two young children, she was let go from a job in the 1980s and the next day started her own software business, which is still going. She inspires us.”

Moore said Old Fourth was the first “legal” distillery in Atlanta since 1906. He said Jeff is the company’s ingenious engineer — without formal college training — and together they birthed not only the distillery but another business that manufactures a type of hardware for mobile computers.

At Old Fourth, the Moores used the alcohol as a mix with aloe to make hand sanitizer for the community around their Edgewood Avenue bar because store shelves were emptied of handwashing items. The Moore brothers filled the void by giving their sanitizer away.

It was apparent to Craig the goodwill would eventually bankrupt the distillery, so he and his brother retooled. Their fermenters and stills cranked out alcohol, and their crew and a co-packer mixed it with tubs of aloe. They industrialized their product. The Southern Company, a colossus in Atlanta with thousands of employees, wanted it for their offices. Delta and Comcast signed contracts. The Moores did a deal with the Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency.

The new business model not only allowed Old Fourth to keep paying employees, but also allowed it to give away product to needy customers in the community.

One month into the new enterprise, Moore’s entrepreneurial gears were still whirring. He was thinking about a vending machine of PPE inside the door of the distillery. Masks, sanitizer, electronic cleaning wipes, all falling out of a machine like a candy bar.

Moore has something else besides a salesman’s savvy: empathy. It is why so many bought into the new-look Old Fourth.

“The president of Georgia Power called me to say thank you for making the hand sanitizer, and I found myself talking with him with the same level of respect I had for the UPS driver,” Moore said. “There’s nothing I believe in more strongly as an entrepreneur than treating all people with the same level of respect.

“If you do that, whether it’s with customers, employees, vendors, it’s going to come back and help you someday, like it is now and all we’re going through.”