Have to admit, I’m a sucker for a great beer label. Even if the beer is crap, and even if I know it’s crap, if it has a cool label, I’m going to find it hard to resist buying it.

Take Chocolate Box, from the charmingly-named Ass Kisser brewery in San Jose. I picked this up while I was in Melbourne for the Great Australasian Beer Spectapular. I made a trip to the Queen Victoria Markets to buy some gifts for the family and stopped in at the Swords wine stall in the foodie section. They’ve got all their beers on shelves and in fridges behind a big counter. So you have stand about five metres away and try and read the labels. Well, I have to try because I’m old and my eyesight is for shit without my glasses.

But I didn’t need glasses to spot this beer. With such a great looking label that reminded me of the cover of a cheap 1950s detective novel, it definitely caught my eye. So I bought it (which must be staggeringly obvious, given that I’m now writing a review of it). It helped that I like the silky mouthfeel of oatmeal stout and also those chocolate stout flavours.

The beer got me all excited once I poured it into a glass with it throwing off some great dark chocolate aroma with a smidge of coffee. The flavour was, however, a bit of a letdown. For my money it was a bit thin, a bit watery. I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want my stouts to be watery – they’re supposed to be thick and chunky (not Campbells soup chunky though – I don’t want bits of stuff floating in my beer).

There were bits of dark cocoa flavour that popped up here and there, and the beer definitely didn’t taste as strong as the claimed 7 per cent. But overall, if I see another bottle of this, with the same dame on the label, I reckon I’ll be able to restrain myself from buying it.