Left Hand Brewing's Week Sauce was designed specifically for craft beer weeks

Colorado Craft Beer Week, which was taken over this year by the nonprofit Colorado Brewers Guild, is just one of many similarly-themed festivals that go on in cities and states across the country. Some of the most famous ones take place in Philadelphia, Seattle and Washington, D.C., but there are dozens of others, not to mention American Craft Beer Week, a nationwide event, and Denver Beer Fest, which takes place in the days leading up to the annual Great American Beer Festival.

Left Hand Brewing plans to attend 21 of these weeks in 2013 and has come up with an interesting strategy to deal with requests to bring a rare or interesting beer.

See also: - A new and improved Colorado Craft Beer Week debuts in March - An all-female collaboration brew is under way at the Wynkoop - Left Hand Brewing becomes the first U.S. craft brewer to bottle a nitro beer

For the past three years, the Longmont brewery has cooked up a special beer, aptly named Week Sauce, which was designed just for beer weeks.

This year's version is a 6.1 percent ABV porter made with a whopping sixty pounds of Sumatra Blue Batak beans in a single sixty-barrel batch. The coffee was sourced from Thornton-based Allegro Coffee, which Left Hand worked with last year as well.

"In Left Hand's 19 year stretch, we've been to more than we can count (or remember, if we're being honest) - but year after year, we get the same old question: 'Give me something special!' the brewery says in a blog explaining the strategy. "Well after much head scratching on behalf of our sales team, we decided to brew a new beer for the very sake of beer weeks - Beer Week Sauce."

The 2013 version has already been tapped in several states after making its debut Arizona Craft Beer Week in February. It will hit Denver on March 18 at an all-Colorado tap takeover at the Falling Rock Taphouse that kicks off Colorado Craft Beer Week. It will also be available on March 19 at a beer dinner at The Kitchen in Denver; on March 20 during Euclid Hall's Kick-the-Keg Brewery Throwdown; and on March 23 during Left Hand's own big beer week party, Hops and Handrails, in Longmont.

After that, coffee-beer drinkers can find it at beer weeks in Nashville, Milwaukee, Albuquerque, Chicago, Asheville, St. Louis and many others.

Week Sauce can also be found on occasion in Left Hand's taproom and at other events, but it won't be packaged and is primarily saved for beer weeks.

Offering "a big punch of roast coffee in the nose," the brewery says the "Earthy, roasty Sumatra coffee plays with a slight citrus hop element Chocolate and strong coffee lead to a finish of coffee roasting and pleasant bitterness." In other words, it is really, really heavy on the coffee flavor, so drinking it for breakfast isn't unacceptable.

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