The best of the Worst beers

Not since my college days have I been so excited to open up my fridge and see a beautiful can of Busch beer staring back at me, tempting me with its white snow cap mountains and deep blue printed skies… I was hooked !!. That was until I tasted it.

This past 4th of July weekend we decided to conduct a scientific taste test to determine the best and worst of the shitty beers. At 4.5 cents an ounce, I didn’t have high hopes.

I will have to admit the scientific set up of this test could have been classified as immature at best. I have watched enough myth busters to know that my controlled test environment was compromised by a group of drunk people playing taboo, and the fact that the person giving the test ( that would be me) was already two sheets to the wind. But even with all of that going on, we gave it our best shot !!! The beers chosen for this test were Miller High Life, Keystone Light, Natural Light, Bush beer, and a local Texas beer called Lone Star.

Coming in at the absolute bottom is Bush Beer.The pride of St. Louis !. Most reviewers winced in agony as they sucked down their half glass of beer. One reviewer spit it out while another one said ” it tastes like my dad in the summer time !!” Not sure what that means but I’m guessing the awful taste has somehow given him brain damage

While Bush is full of flavor, the flavor itself is overwhelmingly bad. According to one taste-tester, it tastes like an UN-kept 70’s Bush.

And with that, let’s continue on to the second-worst beer we tried: Miller High Life. It’s appropriate that High Life is advertised as “the champagne of beers,” because it’s an embarrassment to beer. The only thing funny about High Life is its commercials; the taste falls closer to depressing — or old bar, as we noted. Even for people who like beer, there’s little to salvage this atrocity.

“It reminds me of every drunk skank I made out with ,” suggested one taste-tester.

At the beginning of the upper-tier beers — a term used very loosely — is Natural Light, or Natty light.

Natty Light is the Switzerland of beers, it’s the most neutral of all the beers.Taste-testers said it struck a good balance between the repulsive flavors of the bottom beers and the more enjoyable top-tier. To be fair, this means it doesn’t taste like much at all. Though somewhat bland, at least the people at Busch manufacturing didn’t try to force too many flavors into one 12-oz. can. Faced with the task of creating an admittedly mediocre cheap beer, they neither impress nor disappoint.
If nothing else, taste-testers came to one consensus about Natty: “I could funnel the crap out of this.”

Coming in second is Keystone Light. Keystone Light advertises that it has a bottle taste but in a can. And they are right, if they are talking about the taste of bottle water. Keystone suffers from the same problem that Natty light suffers from, it tastes like nothing. But for some reason keystone’s nothing taste better than Natty Lights nothing.

“I don’t hate this,” said one taste-tester. The overall response was generally positive. But remember a positive response for a dollar beer is like saying ” the zits on your butt don’t look so hideous today “. But i will say that the balance of flavor and the easiness on my tongue did allow us to chug the beer fairly easy.

In a nearly unanimous vote, the testers agreed Lone Star was the best of the bunch. It had the best taste, and even prompted one person to say ” I can drink this all day”

A lot of you don’t have Lone Star in your red neck area of the woods,  but I can assure you that lone star is in the same price range as the other beers, but not in the same taste range. Lone star came out ahead by a mile. It has a full flavor taste and can easily be enjoyed more than once. You could pull one of these out of your cooler with pride and pass it to girl with low moral values knowing that she is not going run away to the guy who is drinking a miller lite.

I fully expect Lone Star to send me a free case of beer for this glowing review. I also expect bush beer to give me a lifetime pass to Bush Gardens for having to drink their product.

Next week I’m going to post my favorite beer of the summer !!!

I know this has nothing to do with koozies, but I want one !!

This ladies and gentlemen is the Lolly. It’s a waffle maker that produces 9.4-inch waffle cones on a stick,  and will give you everything that your lame square waffles are not man enough to do !!

The Lolly can crank out four of these delicious-looking treats in under two minutes, and it fits in your hand like a giant waffle knife waiting to stab at your breakfast hunger. It’s a waffle that  Conan would be proud to eat !!

Monday I will review the “Best beers for under a Buck”

Monday I will have my review on the best beers for under a buck. I think I am looking forward to reliving my college days when the taste of beer did not matter, It was all about the end result.

Its funny… I miss beer pong, I miss drinking games, I miss waking up outside in my neighbor’s lawn, but I don’t miss the taste of  a cold Milwaukee best in a can.  I sometimes wonder what my college experience would have been like if I could have afforded the expensive beer. What type of people would have come and what would the atmosphere been like ? It’s hard to imagine funneling beer with a hefferveisen. Or playing quarters with a heavy stout !!!

Koozies and day jobs dont mix

Starting up a business while you are working full time at another company can take a toll on your life. Everyone I know sends me articles about “scheduling your time more wisely” or they suggest a book on ” time management”. But in the end you realize those books are only valuable during certain times of your life. They also seem to pertain to the working man/ woman with one job and very little financial obligations. Those books tell you how to manage your time, but not how to manage the constant  unforeseen circumstances that make you want to go out for a pack of cigarettes and never come back.  Authors always seem like its so easy to accomplish, but they  never mention a situation where it involves: you working two jobs and  :

– raising a two month old baby. You can manage your time, but you cant manage the schedule of a fussy infant. On top of that, my poor wife needs a break from our daughter so the  moment i walk in the door, a baby is thrown to me as if randy Johnson is pitching game seven of the world series.

– Trying to deal with the devil known as the IRS. Stupid mistake on my part is all I’m saying.

– Trying to spend time with a wife who supports me no matter what, but whose heart breaks a little bit more every time I walk up those stairs to go to my office after she has spent the day cooking, cleaning, and putting our daughter. Her only hope is that one day we can watch a movie from start to finish on the couch without any interruptions.

Don’t get me wrong, I love working on 3D coolie and I have faith that it will all be worth it in the end. But it is a love that takes it toll on you when the majority of your focus was already spent between the hours of 8:am to 6:pm at my other job.

Jim Rome talked about 3d coolie

Jim Rome mentioned us on his daily show.

Some past 3d Coolies

Here are some ideas that were submitted to Barker Specialty. They are a promotional company that we work with

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Why are we 3D Coolie and Not 3D Koozie

A lot of people ask us why we named ourselves 3D Coolie and not 3D Koozie.  When Brent and myself came up with this little venture we spent a large amount of time drinking and thinking about what to call our company. We wanted to come up with a catchy  name that made us sound  hip !! ( I know, “hip” is a  stupid word to describe a company product, but we were drunk !) We came up with a list of company names but almost all of them were taken.

Chill Factory : taken, Cold One : taken, Custom Koozies: taken,  ect..

But eventually the beer wore off and we had the idea to call ourselves 3d Koozie, just one little problem.Believe it or not, there was a lawsuit at the time where a company claimed they owned the sole right to use the word koozie.  The nerve of this company to make a  judicial claim the same month I had a sober moment  where I came up with the idea to start a (hip) koozie company.

We could have stuck with the name 3d koozie but we were not prepared to fight a legal battle if the other company had won their lawsuit. So we opened another beer, lit a G2 cigar and decided  the name coolie would fit us just as nice. Our goal now is to make the term koozie obsolete and coolie will be the name everyone thinks of when they are pressing a cold one to their lips

” Tailgaters Unite”

3D Coolie first post

I have been working as a Lead artist and computer animator for the past 11 years in the video game industry. I am currently working as a lead environment artist at an awesome company called “Certain Affinity”. Prior to CA I spent 1 year at midway,four years at EA Sports (working on John Madden Football, Tiger Woods Golf, Superman,ect…. I graduated from Ringling School of Art and Design and attended Michigan State.

About 2 years ago I had this idea for a 3D Designed koozie where the logo would be the focal point of the beer holder and not just some screened print design. I was living in Orlando at the time, so I designed a Tampa bay Buccaneers koozie on a napkin for my business partner Brent ( he was my favorite drinking partner at the time ) . The feed back was very positive and the amount of gratification that I received from creating a product that started on a simple napkin and eventually became an actual working sample was incredible… I WAS HOOKED !  I gave it some thought and decided lets see if people would be interested in our koozies. This was the start of 3D coolie.com.

Over the next few years Brent ( graduated from my drinking buddy to my business partner) and I started making designs for a number of companies hoping that just one of them would bite. And one did , ESPN bought a design that we made for them and they now sell it in their espn zone stores around the country !!! YEAHHH

Our next move was to buy a small NCAA licence and make a koozie for that school and sell it on our own. We decided on university of Miami. We figured that UM was the right size school to get our feet wet in trying to grow 3dCoolie.com. This blog will follow my ups and downs on trying to start a business while juggling a wife, a 2 month old daughter, and a full-time job that demands my full attention during the day.  I may have bitten off more than I can chew but I need to give it a try to see if I have it in me to start a company !!!

http://www.3dcoolie.com