Widmer Prickly Pear Braggot

I was feeling a tad typey, and my last blog reminded me of one I've been wanting to write about for some time. I've seen this "specialty beer" in almost every supermarket around, so for those who wish to try it should not be hard to find. The beer I'm writing about is Widmer's Prickly Pear Braggot. Braggot is a meadlike beer, where the sugar being used is a sizable amount of honey. Naturally it should have a little bit of a sweeter flavor similar to anything else made with honey. Prickly Pear's grow on cactus' and are painstakingly disassembled for fruit in some areas, obviously where they have more cactus' than our lovely pacific northwest. When your using more sugars, typically you get a higher alcohol percentage, and this beer follows suit sitting at about 10% or so. Different, well definitely it is. There are a great many flavors mashing up and partying down in this Braggot. Now to stop dancing around it, I did not like this ale one bit. Not that I did not applaud the effort and something so different, but it did not taste that good, and parts of the Braggot had the usual ring of half-assedness about it that I've come to expect from Widmer over the last couple years. I've never tried a prickly pear juice before, but this ale just tasted bland, I am not entirely certain if that is the characteristic of that particular fruits flavor, but if it is then I am not a fan. The only hint of flavor is the honey from the standard braggot, trying with all it's might to bust through that glass ceiling of flavor, alas it is being mired and drowned in a sea of blandness. Now another friend of mine tried it, and said it was okay, but nothing special. To be honest considering how different our taste buds are I was expecting a better endorsement than that from him. The bottle says 10%, but like a fair amount of other Widmer beers I have had it tastes watered down. From something that is supposedly that concentrated I was expecting way more flavor, but it never came, essentially it's the dead beat dad of brews. I don't know if it's because of Widmer being so big, the fact that they were bought by In Bev, whatever this just straight up had almost zero appeal to me. For their next shot they need to go back, actually make a drawing board, and start attaching ideas to it. By the end I was starting to think I could get a more desirable flavor out of a can of Steel Reserve. Okay I'll quit picking on the little feller, but dear lord Widmer try again, and please do it with a little bit of what the rest of the world knows as effort, jeez!