Screamin' Sicilian Pizza Co. has a few frozen pizzas under the 'Za Brewski' name, which is a collaboration between Leinenkugel's Original beer and Screamin' Sicilian pizza. The fact that it's made with beer is written on the box in several places. Now I'm no stranger to beer cheese as a dipping sauce, but I can't recall ever trying beer infused pizza crust, or beer cheese as the sauce base for an entire pizza.
From the photo on the box you actually can't tell that the sauce is a beer cheese base rather than tomato base, and Chris didn't realize this until we pulled it out of the freezer for pizza night and he let out an audible sigh because there's no way he would even try it. I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.
In the oven, the pizza was already giving off a sourdough meets beer aroma, but not in a refreshing way. I used to work crowd control at a bar in college and the same bar would transform into more of a sit down restaurant in the daytime. We had to mop the entire bar top to bottom every night at 3am to cut down on the smell of stale beer soaked into the wood floors. That's the smell of beer bread baking in the oven.
The pizza itself had a nice texture and even the toppings looked good. But each bite contained a beer flavored nacho cheese sauce base and aroma of beer bread. It was heavy and for some reason immature tasting, like the kind of thing a 10 year old would love.
Beer cheese with pretzel breadsticks? Amazing. Beer cheese to dip your crust? Amazing. But beer cheese sauce as the entire pizza base? It was just too much, I got sick of it after two pieces and didn’t finish it. On the plus side the pizza box comes with a cut-out mustache you can wear in Instagram photos, so there's that!
