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Longmont’s Left Hand Brewing Company just made it that much easier to get your Milk Stout Nitro fix: For the first time in the beer’s 16-year history, it is now available in canned form.
“Putting our Milk Stout Nitro in a can was a natural move,” says Left Hand co-founder and owner, Eric Wallace. The brewery gained notoriety as a pioneer of the nitro movement in 2011 when it launched Milk Stout Nitro in bottles—the first-ever portable version of a nitrogenated craft beer. The balanced brew is now Left Hand’s top selling beer—the combined sales from the C02 version of the beer and the nitrogenated version make up more than fifty percent of the brewery’s overall sales.
The cans feature a new, unique widget engineered by Ball Corporation. (The widget wasn’t specifically designed for Left Hand’s use, but the Longmont brewery was involved in the design process and is one of the first breweries to use it.) It’s charged with nitrogenated gas which is released into the can when it’s cracked open, similar to a Guinness. The nitro gas imparts the signature smooth and creamy mouthfeel to the beer, and the can makes for a more portable, adventure-ready format.
The limited test run of the canned Milk Stout Nitro will be sold throughout the state of Colorado in four packs. “We’re still in the roll-out phase,” says Wallace. “Once we have everything dialed in and a few months under our belts, we’ll start pushing it out to the rest of the country.”