The Continued, Misguided Attempts to Make Pizza-Flavored Booze Happen
Like many things in the booze industry, it started with a press release.
Arriving in my inbox in late March, it described a “technically complex” yet “fun” cocktail consisting of olive oil-washed Grey Goose, Lustau Blanco vermouth, and G.E. Massenez Garden Party Dried Tomato Liqueur, garnished with goat-cheese-stuffed charred olives.
This was the Pizza Martini from The Flatiron’s Room.
Why was one of the country’s most awarded whiskey bars now hawking a pizza-flavored cocktail?
“A quintessential New York spot like the Flatiron Room deserves a nod to something equally iconic — like a New York slice,” Ben Wald, the bar’s head of beverage programming, told me.
Maybe. But, as the last two decades have shown, pizza-flavored booze is also incredibly effective at getting attention and press.
(Indeed, within days, the Pizza Martini scored a nice write-up on Forbes.)
No one’s ever asked for it. No one seems to actually want it. Yet bartenders, distillers, brewers, and others can’t help themselves from trying to engineer the perfect pizza-flavored cocktail, spirit, or beer.
The First Ever?
Earlier this year, the Providence-based Industrious Spirit Company released Li’l Rhody Pizza Strip, a vodka made from wheat, spices, and pizza strips, a Rhode Island staple. It got a smattering of press, of course, which quickly led to the launch of Pizza Vodka, distilled from organic wheat, herbs and spices, tomatoes, and fresh mozzarella cheese. The distillery touted it as “the first ever pizza vodka?” (question mark theirs).
But if it was, it certainly wasn’t the first pizza spirit.
Credit: Rachel Hulin Studio for ISCO Spirits
Back in 2017, Columbus, Ohio-based 451 Spirits partnered with local pizzeria Late Night Slice to make a pechuga-style whiskey using actual pizza. Their unaged white whiskey was redistilled with pizza slices, then again with sun-dried tomato, basil, and garlic. The result: Pizza Pie’Chuga.
“I wanted to create something similar (to a classic mezcal pechuga) for myself,” said co-founder and chief distiller Chad Kessler at the time. “I thought about what sort of thing I want to put in my spirit — pizza was the only option.”
“Gimmick products made for the press are easy. It’s way harder to have an idea that lasts and people want to sample more than once.”
The distillery touted it as the first-ever pizza-flavored whiskey, but I’ve found at least one earlier example of a pizza pechuga.
In 2015, Paul Hletko of Chicagoland’s FEW Spirits suspended a Chicago deep-dish pie in his gin still, making his own sort of pizza pechuga — perhaps truly the first ever.
“It was a gag; never intended to be a real product,” he told me. “Then we had it, and we didn’t know what to do with it.”
Eventually, he sold the liquid to That Boutique-y Gin Company, which used it in a blend.
“Gimmick products made for the press are easy,” says Hletko. He’d rather focus on actual innovations — and things that taste good — like FEW Cold Cut, a bourbon proofed down with cold brew, and Immortal Rye, proofed down with oolong tea. “It’s way harder to have an idea that lasts and people want to sample more than once,” he says.
Credit: Double Chicken Please
There would be cocktails, too. Like Cold Pizza, the drink offered at Double Chicken (one-time second-best bar in the world), which debuted in 2022. Made with cheese- and burnt-toast-infused tequila, basil and lime cordial, honey, clarified tomato water, lime juice, and egg white, it was blended with a milk frother, then garnished with printed pizza logo atop the froth, and, naturally, became the go-to image whenever the bar was featured in the press.
But why pizza?
Admittedly, it might be the world’s most beloved bite. It’s great drinking food — even better hangover food. Still, plenty of other contenders fit that bill. Where are the cheeseburger Negronis, the taco tequilas, the fried chicken whiskeys?
“[Pizza’s] flavors are straightforward and approachable, needing far less manipulation than most other foods.” says Wald, who’s quick to note he’s not infusing a spirit with pizza flavoring, but rather using the familiar ingredients of pizza. “Tacos, for example, have so many layered components that they’re much harder to translate into a drink.”
Or maybe a taco tequila just wouldn’t get press.
Mamma Mia!
It’s hard to say who was the first genius to think “I really would like to get sloshed on pizza,” but it might have been Tom Seefurth.
In 2005, the Chicago real estate agent was homebrewing on weekends and occasionally entering his beers into amateur competitions. That’s when he started to notice something about the winners: They always tasted completely different from every other entrant.
One day, while brewing a saison, he skipped the usual coriander and orange peel and instead tossed in every single herb he had growing in his backyard. Maybe it was the oregano, but everyone swore the beer tasted like a pizza. Inadvertently, Seefurth realized he’d stumbled upon his million-dollar idea.
“When they do it just for the sake of grossing people out to get press, it burns my rear end.”
Working with his friend, Mike Rybinski, then brewmaster at Walter Payton’s Roundhouse & America’s Brewpub, Seefurth tweaked the recipe by adding fresh garlic, basil, and two kegs of canned tomatoes. It went on tap at the brewpub in May of 2007 and sold so briskly the local news and beer media had no choice but to cover it.
“This beer is a frickin’ world phenomenon,” Seefurth told Beer Advocate at the time.
With one more round of tweaks — lowering the ABV to make it more crushable at pizzerias, now using fresh tomatoes — and a real estate market about to burst, Seefurth invested his final $10,000 to get bottles of Mamma Mia! Pizza Beer on the market. Some people loved it. Many more hated it. But it was catnip for the burgeoning internet, lampooned in early YouTube videos, joked about in Beer Advocate reviews, and eventually name-dropped in a “Tonight Show” monologue, where Jay Leno cracked:
“You know, usually to get those two flavors together, you have to wait until you vomit.”
Really Stupid
The press and notoriety for Mamma Mia! was so strong, other breweries began to jump on the bandwagon.
There was 2015’s Big Ass Money Stout, a “really stupid” collaboration between then-firebrands Evil Twin and Norway’s Lervig Aktiebryggeri, which was brewed with frozen ham-and-pepper pizzas (and Norwegian cash). The following year, Stone Brewing offered “It’s Pizza Time!,” a Belgian-style IPA brewed with sweet basil, oregano, thyme, fennel, jalapeños and pineapple — a salute to Kevin Eastman and his pizza-loving Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Credit: Kevin Gibson via Alcohol Professor
But as these breweries would come to realize — and perhaps already knew — was that Mamma Mia’s press was always going to be stronger than its sales. Making pizza booze isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s a get-press-quick scheme. And without sales to follow, what’s the point?
(Mamma Mia! lost its brewery contract and hasn’t been produced since 2013.)
To a certain extent, even Seefurth realized this — though he claims his motivations were purer than those of the imitators. As he told me back in 2018:
“When they do it just for the sake of grossing people out to get press, it burns my rear end.”
You Have to Wait Until…
And yet, the dream of pizza alcohol hasn’t ended, though it may have shifted from cockeyed dreamers chasing attention to big corporations sometimes even more desperate for it.
Just last year, Voodoo Ranger — the country’s best-selling IPA line — teamed up with frozen pizza brand Tombstone to launch IP(izza)A, made with tomato sauce, herbs and spices, and a kick of pepperoni. It sold for a jaw-dropping $49.99 a 4-pack, launched with a contest, and was touted with a splashy write-up in the New York Post.
Credit: Pizza Hut
Later in 2024, Pizza Hut made media waves with Pizza Wine, a tomato wine infused with fresh basil “that captures the essence of your favorite slice in every sip.” Made in partnership with Kansas-based Irvine’s Just Beyond Paradise Winery, the limited-edition, wax-dipped release came bundled with Pizza Hut-branded wine glasses and a wine opener, all for the reasonable price of $60.
Yet again, no one asked for it. No one wanted it. But the press covered it ad nauseam.
“That’s the reality of an attention-based economy,” says Hletko. “It’s really hard to get Aaron Goldarb to write about our core bourbon. But what is an angle that you’re going to jump onto and latch onto?”
He tells me he recently got formula approval for a Chicago-style hot dog pechuga.
The article The Continued, Misguided Attempts to Make Pizza-Flavored Booze Happen appeared first on VinePair.