Part two in the two-part series of “things I do for you people. For science.”
Basic Info:
Name: Michelob Ultra Lime Cactus
Origin: Anheuser-Busch, Inc., St. Louis, MO
Style: American Lite Beer
ABV: 4.0%
IBU: not available, but let us not kid ourselves. There are no hops in this.
Calories: 95
Carbs: 5.5 g
Protein: 0.5 g
Fat: 0.0g
I drank this: at home, from a bottle, with a bendy straw.
This stuff smells like SweetTarts. Maybe even lime SweetTarts. Not cactus. Having smelled it, I was able to present it like this:
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<— notice skeptical, but not quite as alarmed face as I had when I was trying the Raspberry Pomegranate flavor.
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And then I tried it, hoping for a better experience than I had with the Raspberry Pomegranate. It wasn’t:
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I have never hated everything on the planet so much as I hated it at this exact moment.
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So, the flavor. It tastes like lime, then aspartame (yay artificial sweetener!), and then coconut.
Specifically coconut-scented suntan lotion. If cactus tastes like what I think cactus tastes like, there was none of that up in here. So: lime first, then coconut suntan lotion. Very distinct taste in two parts.
Or, as my Dad said, “Corona with lime tastes infinitely better than this crap.”
Or, my Mom: “This would pair well with shitty tacos.”
Or, my brother: “This leaves my happiness mortally wounded.”
I.e., family concensus was that the Lime Cactus is definitely better than the Raspberry Pomegranate (which, admittedly, is setting the bar low). I think this is due to the aftertaste, that lingering reminder of recently-swallowed horror. The aftertaste of Lime Cactus, while consisting of the aforementioned coconut suntan lotion flavor, isn’t as powerfully FAIL-filled as was the Raspberry Pomegranate’s aftertaste of burning Strawberry Shortcake doll.
This is when the stomachache started.
Remember the picture that demonstrates how fizzy this stuff is? This one?
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I mean, look at the bubbles that collected all over the straw. Not even Coke can pull that level of bubbliness off.
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That carbonation is EVIL. My Mom managed to produce some truly epic burps, burps of the quality that would allow a frat boy (or anyone else with a similar mindframe) to burp out the entire alphabet should they so desire.
If you can’t burp well (or at all, in my case), then you just get a stomachache. A terrible horrible no-good very-bad stomachache. A stomachache so bad that I was left staring quizzically at the bottle, wondering at the genesis of such failure:
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<– notice the bottle level. I had roughly two sips of this when the stomachache began in earnest.
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PAIN, I say unto you, PAIN.
And then Mom attempted (for reasons known only to herself) to induce a hangover by mixing the two. It looked identical to the carbonation-photo glass shown above – really, really fizzy and very yellow. It smelled like aspartame and SweetTarts and tasted of fake beer, some malt (the only time malt made an appearance during the entire experience), and lime/raspberry artificial flavoring (also the only time raspberry made an appearance during the entire experience – the Raspberry Pomegranate flavor tasted specifically of strawberries rather than raspberries. Or pomegranates). My reaction to the combination was this:
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mustnotvomitmustnotvomitmustnotvomit
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BAD. It is BAD. I’m pretty sure this combination originated from the same bowel of hell as the scent of cat pee. Even the creators of flavored Michelob Ultra couldn’t have intended for this to happen.
This is the point when I decided that, for science or not, I couldn’t take it any more. I reached for the 1554 clone and took my reward sip. Like I said in an earlier post, due to the combination of all the failflavoring of the Michelob Ultras (natural, as they claim, or otherwise), the end result was a sip of 1554 that tasted precisely and exactly like CELERY. I ended up laughing so hard that beer almost came out my nose…
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…the laughter continuing as I attempted to sniff the Michelobfail once again, trying to establish what the hell had just happened to my tastebuds.
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I spent the rest of the evening curled up in a tight ball, reading Kiersten White’s Paranormalcy and praying to the Flying Spaghetti Monster to help me burp. I gather Mom spent the rest of the night puke-burping, but I’m not sure. I was in too much pain to do any real investigation.
To sum up once and for all: don’t try this at home.
