Left Hand Brewing absorbs Aurora’s Dry Dock

LONGMONT — Longmont-based craft brewing stalwart Left Hand Brewing Co. recently acquired Aurora’s Dry Dock Brewing Co., which will now produce its apricot-forward line of beers at Left Hand’s Boulder County brewery.

“We’ve known them for decades —  we wouldn’t be doing a deal if we hadn’t built a strong trust over the years,” Left Hand founder and CEO Eric Wallace said of Dry Dock’s leadership group.

While specific terms of the acquisition haven’t been disclosed, Wallace told BizWest that Dry Dock founder Kevin DeLange will continue working with the combined organization and has taken an equity stake in Left Hand parent company Indian Peaks Brewing Co.

Prior to the acquisition, the vast majority of Dry Dock’s output was sold in Colorado, but Wallace said that distribution is likely to expand in the near future.

“We’ve had a dozen wholesalers reach out already asking for samples and asking when they can buy,” he said. 

In the face of industrywide challenges — shifts in consumer preferences and supply-chain issues, for example — Dry Dock continues to brew “probably the leading apricot beer in the country,” Wallace said. Dry Dock’s signature beer is its Apricot Blonde.

DeLange and his team will continue to run Dry Dock’s Aurora taproom, at least for the foreseeable future, he said, “and Kevin is going to be working closely with our sales team to make sure that relationships are maintained and handed over and developed.”

Wallace said that Left Hand’s Longmont brewery has enough capacity to handle manufacturing of its flagship line — led by its popular Milk Stout Nitro — and Dry Dock’s offerings. “We’re looking to get the plant as busy as we can get it,” he said, “and this is a good step in the right direction.”

Left Hand, Wallace said, will continue to seek out new partnerships in the form of both contract-brewing deals and acquisitions.

“We’re creative, and we’re flexible, if nothing else,” he told BizWest, but “operating conditions just continue to get harder” for independent breweries that are hesitant to align with out-of-state (or even out-of-country) mega-conglomerates. 

“You can see what happened to many of our peers who were vacuumed up by the big guy, right? Many of them were ultimately discarded when they emptied the vacuum bag,” Wallace said.

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