Left Hand’s recipe for brewing up innovation

LONGMONT —With beer sales down in recent years across the board, craft brewers are facing a “structurally contracting market,” according to Eric Wallace, founder and CEO of Longmont-based craft brewing stalwart Left Hand Brewing Co. “So what are we going to do? Are we going to shut the doors, or we’re going to try to change it up?”

With shutting the doors off the table, Left Hand has embraced a philosophy of innovation to continue chugging along in the increasingly challenging brewing sector.

“I think innovation is one part creativity and two parts survival,” Wallace told BizWest. “You’ve got to innovate as the market changes. And as tastes change you’ve got to respond to that or you become obsolete.”

Left Hand has “changed it up” by “seeing who else is feeling the squeeze and who wants to team up,” Wallace said. 

The company absorbed Aurora’s Dry Dock Brewing Co. this spring and will produce its apricot-forward line of beers at the Longmont brewery.

Left Hand is always “trying to stand out a little bit,” Wallace said. The brewery’s signature beer, the Milk Stout Nitro, “certainly helps us with that because (nitrogenated stouts are) definitely a niche that we occupy.”

But the heavy creaminess of the Milk Stout Nitro lends itself best to cold-weather drinking, leaving a gap to fill in the warm-weather months. That’s where Dry Dock Brewing Co.’s lineup, highlighted by its signature Apricot Blonde offering, comes in handy. 

With its light, easy-sipping beer portfolio, Dry Dock “matches up with us really well because of this opposite seasonality,” Wallace said. 

Left Hand also recently rolled out a new varietal — the Colorful Colorado IPA, described as a “bold, dank, and aromatic … brew (that) delivers a euphoric hit of pineapple, pine, and citrus notes” — meant for year-round drinking. 

Beyond acquiring other breweries and bringing their production to Longmont, Left Hand uses its extra manufacturing capacity to brew beers on a contract basis for breweries that it doesn’t own. 

Smaller operators might have labor costs “five or six times higher than ours,” Wallace said. “So in some cases, for some companies, it makes sense to push that off, especially if they’re capacity strapped and they have a lot of varieties that they need to keep up with.”

In addition to beer, Left Hand contracts to produce hard kombucha and tea. 

Left Hand has taken an innovative approach to fundraising in recent years, turning to WeFunder, an online platform helping companies solicit capital from non-accredited investors, as well as a more-traditional Securities and Exchange Commission Regulation D funding round, to raise capital.

“I had to buy out my partner or they were going to sell the company,” Wallace said. “So we spent a lot of money, like millions, to buy back over half the stock, and I needed to replace some of that.”

The company has raised about $1.8 million through the Reg D and WeFunder efforts, putting Left Hand about two-thirds of the way to its fundraising goal.

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