I've actually had good luck with beer. I was told to buy the cheapest beer I could find, pour it into a shallow disposable container, and set it out in my yard.
I bought one can of some off brand I had never heard of before. (I paid about $2 for at a little convenience store.) I put it in an aluminum foil pie pan late in the evening -- the sun was still up -- and I stood there and watched what had to be
hundreds of slugs coming toward it through the grass! When I got up the next morning, the pan was literally heaped full of dead slugs. I went back to the store and bought more of the same brand of beer and set 8 pans full out in my yard. By summer's end, my yard was pretty much slug free. That got the situation under control, so in subsequent years, I only had to put out 3 or 4 pans of beer to keep the slug population down.
I live in a different house now and have brown garden snails, but very few slugs. The snails don't seem to respond to beer as well as the slugs did, so I hand pick them. I just pick them, drop them on the ground, and step on them. I make sure I squash them really well, too!

I have used Corry's Snail and Slug Bait in the past, and it certainly works well, but now I have quite a lot of wild animals that frequent my yard, and I don't want to risk harming any of them. I have 5 lovely garter snakes (two 3' long adults and 3 smaller ones) that live in my yard, too, and I'm not sure whether they eat snails or not. Just in case they do, I wouldn't want them to get hold of one that was poisoned.