When Left Hand Brewing Co. co-founders Eric Wallace and Dick Doore wrote their business plan, they probably didn’t pencil in two Great American Beer Festival medals during their first year of operation. And they certainly didn’t plan on a visit from a government regulatory agency that might have put them out of business.

“You go from being an overgrown homebrewer to running a business real quick,” Wallace said this past fall, as the Longmont, Colo., brewery neared its fourth anniversary. When they started brewing in January 1994, Wallace
and Doore owned 25 kegs and sold 22-ounce bombers door to door. Today, they own 2,000 kegs, and in October Left Hand announced a merger with Tabernash Brewing Co. of Denver. Tabernash moved its operations into Left Hand’s brewery and is building a $1 million, 6,000-square-foot addition. The two brewers will share equipment, including a bottling line for 12-ounce bottles, which should be in operation by the summer.

Left Hand’s work force has increased from two to 17 — 14 of whom are full time — in four years. Doore now oversees production, while Wallace handles marketing and sales. On a typical day the brewery resembles a beehive, with workers swarming around the various rooms. Sales personnel gather in the front office. Cellarman Bubba Love (whose real name is seldom mentioned) is at work in the fermentation and conditioning room, where Black Jack Porter exhibits signs of vigorous fermentation — the blowoff bucket overflows onto the floor. Workers bottle 22-ounce bombers by hand on the small bottling machine. Brewers Matt Gilliland and Steve Seiwerath assist the expansion crew.  

Doore and Wallace did not envision rapid growth. Their goal was to operate a brewery that shipped 2,500 to 3,000 barrels and employed three or four people. “We were so naive, it was absurd,” Wallace says.

What they got was a baptism by fire, because early successes forced them to run the brewery at capacity right away. The first batch of beer was brewed in January 1994, and that April Left Hand Sawtooth Ale took best in its category and Best of Show at the Great International Beer Tasting in Denver. Then, at the 1994 Great American Beer Festival, Sawtooth took a gold medal, Black Jack Porter won a bronze medal (and it was the first batch of porter the brewery made), and Juju Ginger Ale received honorable mention. The 17-barrel system, capable of producing 1,700 barrels a year, was nearly maxed out; Left Hand shipped 1,400 barrels that first year. Since then, the brewery has expanded in increments.

Left Hand makes five year-round beers and a variety of seasonals. Sawtooth Ale, an English-style extra-special bitter, is based on one of Doore’s favorite homebrew recipes. The well-balanced bitter is made with five malts and a combination of English hops. “That’s fairly normal for us,” Wallace says. “We are looking for depth and complexity.” While Longmont’s glacier-melt soft water is ideal for brewing, the brewers harden it to simulate the water at Burton-on-Trent, the home of English bitters. Sawtooth accounts for almost half of the brewery’s sales.

Black Jack Porter is a London-style porter with a very dark ruby color. It’s made with two-row pale, crystal, and chocolate malts, and Northern Brewer and Kent Goldings hops. The chocolate malt lends a pronounced roastiness, which is balanced out by the Kent Goldings, and the water is conditioned to a medium hardness. It has 6.2
percent alcohol by volume (ABV).  

Motherlode Golden Ale is a malty Scottish-style ale made with two-row, Munich, and crystal malts and lightly hopped with Northern Brewer and Cascade for bittering only. It is brewed from a fairly high gravity, and the relatively low attenuation leaves a residual sweetness. A high mash temperature produces a full-bodied beer.  

Left Hand’s Juju Ginger Ale is a low-gravity pale ale with some of the hops replaced by freshly ground ginger root. The result is a light-bodied, refreshing beer with a distinct ginger aroma and a very crisp finish. It weighs in at 4.2 percent ABV.

Jackman’s American Pale Ale is an American-style pale ale flavored with Nugget and Cascade hops and finished with Mt. Hood. As with all the beers, the brewers’ goal with Jackman’s was to find a balance, especially with the hops. Pale Ale has an ABV of 5.6 percent.

One popular seasonal is Maid Marion Berry, which is a cross between an ale and a mead. Marion berries are added during the fermentation, and the drink has more of a mead character because of the substantial amount of honey used. Other seasonals include XXXmas Ale, a spiced strong ale; Deep Cover Brown Ale; Bard’s Ale, a traditional mild brewed for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival; St. Vrain Organic Tripel; and Imperial Stout, made with some flaked oats for added body and smoothness.  

The seasonals are not only fun to brew but are good business. “You create excitement and novelty in the market,” Wallace says. “I’ll get asked all year long when the Imperial Stout will be on.” Left Hand will make five 34-barrel batches of the stout; much more would not be practical because of the longer production time. The imperial stout takes twice as much malt as other beers and must be transferred more often because it isn’t filtered. “It’s about 1.090 (specific gravity), plus or minus,” Doore says. “Basically, we fill up the mash tun and we get whatever we get. We keep pouring in two-row until we stop.”

Given such a sentiment, it’s no surprise that Doore and Wallace started as homebrewers. Wallace developed an appreciation of fine beer early on; his father was an officer in the US Air Force, and the family lived in various countries, including Germany. They moved to Colorado in the late 1970s, and Wallace was appalled to discover mainstream American beer. He tasted a domestic lager and thought someone was playing a joke on him. “I could never accept the fact that the richest country on Earth couldn’t produce a good beer,” he says.

He and Doore met as cadets at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs in the early 1980s. Wallace spent eight years in Italy and Turkey as a communications officer with the Air Force, and met his Italian wife, Cinzia, in London. They moved to Colorado in 1993, by which time the craft-brewing movement was in full swing. Doore left the Air Force in 1990 and earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of New Hampshire before heading to Colorado. The partners-to-be were living in Niwot — named for Chief Niwot, whose name translates to “Left Hand” — and thinking they needed to find jobs, when they decided to start a microbrewery. They found a suitable building, a former sausage factory (the mash tun sits over the old pig killing floor) that had sloped floors with drains in them. Its location on two acres of land along the St. Vrain River provided room for expansion.  

The brewery remains a mixture of high and low tech. Kegs are still filled by hand, but there is a separate lab, where the beer is monitored and samples of just about anything else in the brewery can be analyzed.

Warning signs are posted throughout the building, alerting employees to potential dangers. They’re much more prominent than one usually finds in a microbrewery. An Occupational Safety and Health Administration representative literally came knocking at the door in early 1995 after OSHA received a complaint from a disgruntled former employee. Doore and Wallace discovered they were in violation of many OSHA regulations, due to ignorance, and wondered if they would survive the potential fines. As part of an agreement with OSHA, they promised to educate other equally oblivious brewers about the regulations.  

While Left Hand beers are currently distributed throughout Colorado and in eight other states, 80 percent of sales are within the state, and the bulk of those are in Longmont and nearby Boulder. Left Hand has 80 tap handles in Boulder County, and those handles move 400 kegs a month. The distinctive handle, which features a black left hand bearing the appropriate bottle label, may have contributed to Left Hand’s on-draft success.  

Wallace wants to make sure Left Hand remains distinctive in the marketplace. That’s one reason Bubba Love recently began learning how to condition “real ale” in British firkins, something almost unheard of in Colorado. “This is a fairly sophisticated beer market — that’s a good thing,” Wallace says. “But there are a lot of people who have seen that and tried to move in.”

He’s confident that the alliance with Tabernash will increase Left Hand’s ability to serve its current market and allow for greater expansion, since it makes both breweries more efficient. “They make great beer, and we’re both respected in our home market,” Wallace says. “I think it’s a good combination.”

Left Hand hosts brewery tours on Saturdays. The small tasting room and retail sales desk are open 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays, 10 to 5 Saturdays.

Left Hand Brewing Co. is located at 1265 Boston Ave., Longmont, Colo. Call (303) 772-0258. Its Web page is: www.lefthandbrewing.com.

Stan Hieronymus and Daria Labinsky are authors of the Beer Travelers Guide, which lists more than 1,700 brewpubs, bars, and restaurants in the United States that serve flavorful beer.