Yes. This exists.
I was given some courtesy of my gingerneer friend at Gingerneer Beer, who has provided her own review here. I haven’t yet figured out how to pay her back.
Basic Info:
Name: Mamma Mia! Pizza Beer
Origin: Tom and Athena Seefurth, Campton Township, IL
Style: pizza herb/vegetable beer
ABV: 4.6%
IBU: not listed
I drank this: poured from a bottle
Pizza beer is the result of a homebrewing experiment by some beer-loving types who were most likely drinking at the time of the idea’s conception. I mean, PIZZA BEER. They *had* to be drinking, right?
Anyway, Pizza Beer is “Ale Brewed with Oregano, Basil, Tomato & Garlic.” If you’re a regular drinker of beer (or at the very least a regular reader of this blog), then you know that none of the listed ingredients are among common (or even uncommon) beer flavors. They’re not common alcohol flavors in anything except a Bloody Mary (or a Red Eye, in the case of tomatoes). A quick round of google taught me that basil is becoming a popular ingredient in some foofy-sounding martinis, that oregano and alcohol seem not to combine ever. Garlic supposedly helps cure hangovers and is otherwise only involved in alcohol when a garlic-stuffed olive gets shoved into a good vodka martini.
What I’m saying here is that they get 100 points for creativity and a few extra for being out of their ever-loving minds.
So how is it?
It’s… interesting. I’d even go all the way up to “it doesn’t completely suck.” It’s emphatically not the worst beer I’ve ever had (that honor still goes to the Roy Pitz Lovitz (Watermelon) Lager)(I’m not counting the Michelob Ultra experiments as beer). Basically, it’s like someone dumped oregano oil into a very light ale or a lighter (but not LITE) lager. It’s overwhelmingly oregano, up there with dropping straight oregano oil onto your tongue. It’s also bubbly, slightly reddish in hue, and has a slight tomato addition to the OREGANO *jazzhands* aftertaste (which lasts FOREVER)(but might be okay if you were eating fresh mozzarella – it would provide a hugely oregano flavor to go along with the light flavor of that cheese),
I want a case of this stuff. There are a couple of reasons for this. It’s my favorite beer ever to spring on unsuspecting beer snobs because it’s pretty much guaranteed that they’ll never have had anything like it. In oddity factor, it rates up there with the homebrew recipe I saw that involved sticking a chicken carcass in during the boil (I kind of want to do this, but only if I can find 15 other people to help me drink the stuff once it’s done). The other thing is that they’ve got a bunch of recipes on their website that make use of the Pizza Beer (I love to cook) - while I can’t see wanting to drink a whole bottle, I could see where it could make for interesting eats.
So there you have it. Pizza beer.
