The Beer Garden

Taste: 4
After Taste: 4
Label: 4
Buzz Factor: 3

Notes: A good, but not great beer. It has a nice dark color and a pleasing aroma. The taste is mellow and a bit sweet with the aftertaste fading almost instantly. While I like this beer and will definitely drink it again, the taste is simply not memorable.

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Bert’s Review
Taste: 4
After Taste: 4
Label: 4
Buzz Factor: 3

Notes: I dig this beer. It’s rich & flavorful and would have gone great with a good meaty dinner… which is what I thought as I enjoyed mine with a stack of ritz crackers. Which, by the way, it is also a great accompaniment to. This beer could seriously make Ramen noodles gourmet. Then they would be Ramén noodles or something.

Now, on to the label… I love the illustration. It’s subtle and unexpected and beautiful. I did give it a point off however because I kind of thought maybe it was a warning to lay off the hooch or this is how you’ll end up! Those kind of things go on the back where nobody bothers to look. The label is actually a more neutral color, but apparently there was a white-balance issue. Shawn - were you or were you not just bragging that you read Deke McClelland’s Photoshop Bible? Did he forget to mention color-correcting? That’s neither here nor there though. The label is cool. But, god, I just want to take my pen tool to that logo!

Taste: 3
After Taste: 3
Label: 2
Buzz Factor: 4

Notes: I don’t have anything negative to say about the flavor except that i feel a little let down. Oatmeal & Imperial Stouts are a couple of my favorites, I assumed combing the two would be golden. The label on the other hand sucks! I would have rated it a 1 but I love dogs, so it gets a reprieve. The clipping paths are poor the Copperplate font should not have been outlined the way it was. And the mixture of a photographic dog, line art of oats, and the high contrast duotone of the brewery just don’t jive! Please rip this label off of the bottle before consumption!

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Bert’s Review
Taste: 3
After Taste: 3
Label: 1
Buzz Factor: 2

Notes: I agree with my drinking buddy, Shawn. When it comes to the beer description, he’s dead on. It’s… ok. But if being average is all this beer wants to be, that’s cool… C’s get degrees. But, I guess if Fat Dog wants to flop whoppers the rest of his life, that’s awesome. Extra pickles for me please and please, for the love of god spread the condiment around some instead of just squirting a gob of it in the middle. But, I guess that is the slacker way.

Here’s my thought on improving the label. First, make it white, all white. Now, as large as you can type the word “BEER.” in the boldest, blackest version of Helvetica you have. Don’t bother using the condensed version… just squish it to oh, about 70%. That oughta do it.

Taste: 5
After Taste: 5
Label: 5
Buzz Factor: 3

Notes: This is good beer! It smells like a mocha, has a nice dark color and has a supa smoov flava! This shit is so good, I just might use it in my cherios tomorrow morning! The label highlights would be the nice use of their logo in the cow’s spots and the fact that they are die cut.

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J-Ro’s Review

Taste: 5
Aftertaste: 5
Label: 4
Buzz Factor: 4

What? A beer with milk in the name? This beer is actually one of my favorite beverages that I’ve tried for this site. It has a wonderfully warm, rich dark chocolate/coffee flavow that really sticks with you for a while. Ever wanted to make beer ice cream? Check out the Left Hand site’s section on this beer for a recipe for Milk Stout Chocolate Ice Cream. After a few attempts, your’s truly made a batch and have been enjoying it ever since. It tastes pretty much like chocolate ice cream, but does have a subtle underlying beer flavor. Very nice, indeed.

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Bert’s Review

Taste: 5
Aftertaste: 5
Label: 4
Buzz Factor: 3

OOOH… this beer is so good! And so smooth. If this beer approached me in a bar… he’d say something like “do you believe in love at first site, or should I walk past again or…even better… can I buy you another Left Hand Milk Stout?” Oh yeah, that’s some smoothness. Smooth like a marble floor that’s been polished with K-Y jelly.

I gave the label design a 4 just based on the hand print spots on the cow. It’s reminds me of the saying “Does chocolate milk come from brown cows?” Well, I may be a city girl, but I can tell you that my favorite lactic beverage comes from the cow with the left hand print spots.

Taste: 5
After Taste: 4
Label: 2
Buzz Factor3

Notes: Damn! I love this beer! even before drinking it, it just smells gorgeous! (really take a whiff before you drink it) The taste is refreshing, a little fruity and perfect to drink while lounging outside in the summer! As far as the label goes….. well, I like the colors….

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J-Ro’s Review

Taste: 5
After Taste: 4
Label: 4
Buzz Factor: 3

I admit I was surprised to read on the label that this is a wheat beer - it lacks the spicy-fruitiness I usually associate with a standard wheat beer and replaces it with a deep, warm, refreshing flavor. I’ve tried (and enjoyed) this beer before, but when I drank it with this review in mind, I was outside grilling some delicious cheeseburgers on a warm Spring day and found it the perfect complement to the meal as well as the weather - I can’t wait to have another one after a long day in the Summer sun.

Taste: 1
After Taste: 1
Label: 5
Buzz Factor: 2

Notes: I pretty much hated this beer. I bought it because i thought the label rocked, but I can’t say the taste matched. When I first opened it, I thought I had opened champagne, by that I mean it was bubbly! This stuff continued to foam for over two minutes, and made me burp for the next two hours! All in all, I would say, this beer just isn’t my style… It was oddly just a little refreshing though, and the judging by the quality of the label, I feel like this is a company I want to work for. However, I simply would not accept this swill as payment for my services.

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J-Ro’s Review

Taste: 1
After Taste: 1
Label: 2
Buzz Factor: 1

I’m am sorry to say that this was one of the worst tasting beverages to pass my lips in recent memory. It had a strong, almost acidic flavor, that tasted to me like the brewer’s weren’t quit finished perfecting the beer. It almost tasted like a (failed) prototype. Maybe I wasn’t in the mood for this particular type of beer at the time and I should try it again, but it just was not an enjoyable experience.

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Bert’s Review

Taste: 1
After Taste: 1
Label: 4
Buzz Factor: 1

Ugh… How can I best ensure, you the reader never wastes your hard-earned drinking money on this beverage. Here goes… Once, in college, I had the misfortune of passing a kidney stone. Something I hope never happens to you… it was so bad I swear it almost made me give up drinking. Almost. Besides the excuciating pain, another fun side effect was throwing up bile about every 5 minutes.

Now, if someone made me choose between that experience and having to drink the Farmhouse Ale again… I’d pick the beer for sure. However, having said that, if I had no other option I’d chase a chug of it with bile just to get the taste out of my mouth.

Taste: 3
After Taste: 3
Label: 4
Buzz Factor3

Notes: Fruity, acidic flavor that I could really taste underneath my tounge. Taste almost had a hint of apple. The aftertaste starts on a high note, but finishes pretty clean. Label has a nice “painted on barn” look.

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J-Ro’s Review:
Taste: 3
After Taste: 3
Buzz Factor: 3
Label: 4

In the tradition of wheat beers, this one is very light with a fruity/spicy thing going on. It’s very refreshing and I’ll have to remember to try it again this summer after a long bike ride in the warm sun. I like the label, it has a nice “down home” kind of feel to it.

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Bert’s Review:
Taste: 2
After Taste: 2
Buzz Factor: 3
Label: 3

Is it called #2 because it’s shitty? Who does #2 work for? Not so much for me. I guess I’d drink it if it were around, but then again cats will drink antifreeze if that’s around too. And I have been known to scrape change for a 12 of Natty Light. But, I’ve grown up, a little. I guess I’ll hold out for #3.

The label is cool, but maybe they just need to… and I quote “ditch the circus font!”

SHAWN’S REVIEW

• Taste: 4
• After Taste: 3
• Label: 4
• Buzz Factor: 3

Starts off with a kind of sweet and fruity refresing taste. The aftertaste is on the other side of the spectrum though. It ends on the bitter side and I also caught hints of a mault alcohol taste. The label is good, it has a cool water color look of an owl sitting atop a barbed wire fence. Since both owl’s and barbed wire rock, I rate it highly.

JASON’S REVIEW

• Taste: 2
• After Taste: 2
• Label: 3
• Buzz Factor: 3

If this is the best Bell can offer, they better learn how to make something else! It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just not up to par with Bell’s usual offerings. The flavor is bitter, but yet subdued. I almost regret buying a six pack of this for the review, becayse now I’m going to have to figure out how to get rid of the other five bottles. Of course, I will probablly manage to find some way to drink all of these during tomorrow’s football games, but I won’t be enjoying it. OK, I take that back, I will enjoy it - it is beer after all!

The label design is typical from Bell, subdued and understated. I can appreciate it from an artistic standpoint, but you have to wonder if it’s how you would really want your beer to be represented visually.