Friday beer: Wake Up Dead Imperial Stout

I can’t tell you the 49th or 51st brewery our daughter, Sierra, visited, but you always remember the 50th. She was 10 months old in the fall of 1997 and had been walking a while (adding a certain amount of excitement to brewery visits). I have a photo — but I’d be in trouble if I posted it here — of her holding her left hand up to the Left Hand Brewing logo.

The quote collected that day — Daria and I were working on a story for Brew Your Own Magazine — I remember best was from co-founder Eric Warner: “The large brewers are not tooled to do what we do. They’ll have to build less-than-efficient breweries to make beer like we do.”

But yesterday evening I also thought of something Dick Doore, the other founder, said. He was talking about their imperial stout, which already had a serious following. They made it once a year, and in 1997 that amounted to 170 barrels (5,270 gallons).

“Basically, we fill up the mash tun and we get whatever we get. We keep pouring in two-row until we stop,” he said.

Now called Wake Up Dead and just as imperial it has become the third beer in Left Hand’s Nitro Series (Milk Stout Nitro was the first nitrogenated bottled craft beer without a widget). It arrived at The Wine and Cheese Place yesterday morning. We drank some last night and I thought about what Doore said.

A one word review: Dangerous. The beer is 10.2% ABV and awakens, perhaps frees would be a better word, a rush of images. So here’s another non-review by photo and minimalist caption.

Left Hand Wake of the Dead Imperial Stout

“The devil got behind the wheel”