Left Hand Bittersweet Nitro Imperial Coffee Milk Stout
Photos via Left Hand Brewing Co.
Every now and then, a new product comes along that makes you ask “Why didn’t this already exist?” There’s not a ton that motivates me to write stand-alone beer reviews these days, but something as elemental as a new imperial version of one of the country’s most style-defining beers is just such an occasion.
And that goes doubly in this case, because I have always wondered why a beer matching this description didn’t already exist. Left Hand Brewing Co. is an anomaly in the American craft beer scene for one reason above all others: Their flagship beer, the beer that keeps the company going, is a milk stout.
Lots of breweries have porters or stouts in their lineup, although as we’ve written about in the past, non-adjunct, non-imperial American stout is something of an endangered species these days. But almost no sizeable American brewery has ever had a porter or stout as their top-selling cash cow. Porter and stout are typically secondary or tertiary players—they have dedicated fans, but most every regional American brewery has a top seller/volume brand that is either IPA, pale ale, lager or even kettle sour. Few have ever managed to define the brewery’s image by selling that much stout, especially over the course of decades. Only two really come to mind: North Carolina’s Duck Rabbit, and Left Hand itself.
So with that said, I always wondered: With Left Hand Milk Stout being such a style-defining example, and the Nitro version effectively setting the mold for canned, nitrogenated stouts in the USA, why has there never been a year-round imperial version of that same beer? Does that not seem like the most obvious idea in the world? What Left Hand fan wouldn’t want to try that beer? It seems like it would sell itself. And it’s not that Left Hand hasn’t made plenty of imperial stouts, mind you—but why not an imperial version of the flagship in the core rotation? The only reason that comes to mind is that the brewery perhaps didn’t want to water down the cache of the original in doing so, or worried that imperial milk stout sales might cannibalize sales of their own flagship. Whatever the reason, it’s something I’ve thought about whenever revisiting the iconic Left Hand Milk Stout.
Note: The brewery does produce other Nitro imperial stouts, such as Wake Up Dead and Galactic Cowboy, but they aren’t milk stouts.