Beer labels can be beautiful, too. Here are five cool ones from Colorado brewers.

Jonathan Shikes | September 29, 2011 | 8:31am

When Longmont's Left Hand Brewing hired Boulder-based Moxie Sozo to redesign its labels a couple of years ago, the results opened a lot of eyes -- and landed Left Hand beers on a lot of best-designed beer label lists. As an added bonus, Moxie, a Boulder design and advertising agency, incorporated the hidden face of at least one Left Hand or Moxie Sozo employee in every label.

But there's much more cool beer-label art out there, and since this is Great American Beer Festival week in Denver, the time is right to celebrate it.

Beer labels can be beautiful, too. Here are five cool ones from Colorado brewers.

See if you can find the head of a Left Hand or Moxie employee in this awesome label. Hint: It's not one of the skulls.

This beer hasn't yet been released, but when it does come out this winter, it will replace another cool New Belgium bottle, 2 Below. Both labels really evoke winter and make you want to drink beer by a raging fire.

This label no longer graces the sides of Fort Collins-based Funkwerks Brewing's bottles of Maori King, after a controversy over the Maori image; the name of the beer was also changed to Southern Tropic. But the design was elegant, beautiful and really well done, so it's a shame it had to disappear.