Pizza seems like it was invented with beer in mind. The salty, rich, cheesy mess is a perfect pairing for a crisp lager, an Irish Red Ale, a dry stout, or any myriad of other styles. You can dress pizza up in just about as many ways as you can brew different beer.

So you had to know someone, somewhere was going to come up with a way to put pizza IN beer. And, indeed, someone has (and wasn’t even Edmonton’s homebrewing mad scientist, Ernie, creator of Neopolitan Stout). It is Illinois homebrewer – you just KNEW it had to be a homebrewing experiment, didn’t you? – Tom Seefurth, who liked it so much he arranged to have it produced commercially.

In an unsurprising move, he named it Mamma Mia! and it recently hit Alberta store shelves. Never one to pass up a gimmick beer I gave it a try. I was sufficiently intrigued by my first sip I fired up my word processor and started a column on it, which you can read here.

Now, when I say intrigued, I don’t mean I loved it. I am not even sure, in  hindsight, I even liked it. But, man, did it offer a fascinating mixture of flavours that I thought I would never associate with beer. Basil, oregano, garlic and lots of tomato. In the interests of accuracy, the essential ingredient in pizza, cheese, is absent. So, strictly speaking, it is spaghetti sauce beer, not pizza beer but I imagine the marketing potential of “spaghetti sauce beer” is remarkably more limited than pizza beer.

It is not a bad beer, but nor is it one that I will rush out to buy again. You can read the full details of the review in the column, but the Coles notes is that the different flavours seem to fight one another, rather than complement. In a beer with odd ingredients, you need to find a way to make the whole bigger than the sum of its parts. Mamma Mia doesn’t really succeed on this front. Thre is too much tension, and not enough symbiosis going on.

However there were parts I quite liked. I found tomato worked better than I thought it would, and it leaves me thinking basil has potential too. Still, the beer fails to escape the dreaded “novelty” segment of the market. I don’t regret trying it, though.