Cincinnati’s (Often Forgotten About) Left Hand Taproom

Written By: The Gnarly Gnome
Photography By: The Gnarly Gnome

2//6/25

I have a hard time believing that anyone who has been drinking craft beer for a while hasn’t encountered one of the OGs: Left Hand Brewing. For the sake of argument and to give you a little context behind this whole post, I suppose I should catch everyone up, though—just in case, you know?

Left Hand? You Know Them, Right?

Left Hand opened its doors in 1994 and has been making beers like its now-famous Milk Stout for as long as I have been drinking beer (longer, in fact). Located in Longmont, Colorado, it was one of the go-to breweries for many before the beer scene absolutely exploded here in Cincinnati.

Forgive me if I expect every craft beer drinker around me to know about them, but they did pioneer the use of Nitrogenated beer in the American craft beer industry. They were the first to put out a nitro beer without a widget, for the love of God.

It’s easy to overlook them with everything that is currently happening in Cincinnati beer, so I won’t get angry if you are just now learning about them. Let this be a call to action for you to get out there and see what they’re about.

OG.

The Taproom Search Beings

Back in the “pre-COVID” days, there was an active search happening here in Cincinnati for a spot to open a Left Hand Taproom. One of the two founders of the brewery spent a bit of time growing up here (his Dad was in the AirForce, so he bounced around a lot) – his Mom, though… her family was from right here in town, and through a cousin that still lives here, the connection was made for this taproom project to come to life.

The project took on a new life, though, when an ownership group that was trying to start their own thing in downtown Montgomery reached out with an idea… instead of opening a dedicated Left Hand space in a city like Cincinnati (we can get a little territorial), why not team up and work together?

That’s why about a month after they hosted their grand opening in the summer of 2020, MPH welcomed in Left Hand beer alongside their own housemade beers.

So, How Does All This Work?

Left Hand doesn’t “own” MPH. That needs to be made clear from the top, before you can understand how it all works. With that being said, it’s a little more complicated than just a brewery that likes to buy Left Hand beer to put on tap.

There are multiple owners of MPH, or Montgomery Public House (there was a group of four when they opened… I’m not sure how that has changed in the almost 5 years, since) when the ownership team reached out to ‘Left Hand Cincinnati’ (that’s the name of the company that was hoping to open up a taproom) – that company became the fifth owner of the brewery… so they have a small, minority stake in things – but don’t really do anything to run the business day-to-day.

How Do We Benefit As Drinkers?

As I mentioned earlier, it’s easy to overlook a place like Left Hand now that Cincinnati has so many great breweries. While I’m always one to preach drinking local as much as possible and making your dollar matter on a deeper level than we often do, we can also miss out when we do that.

Drinkers don’t pick up beers that hold an important spot in the bigger craft beer story, and I think that’s a loss. Knowing where things came from and trying some of the best examples of a beer style are critical to becoming a better craft beer drinker (which should be our goal).

Having a taproom that brings some of those beers in front of us, like MPH does, is wonderful because it ties those two sides of the industry together: the older, legendary beers that built this industry and the new stuff that’s happening now.