The Pizza Diaries: Saucy Brew Works

For our last Pizza Diaries we hit a wine bar, so for this trip we hit a brewery! I guess this just shows that pizza is everywhere if you look hard enough (this should be printed on a t shirt). But seriously, pizza and beer go together like PB & J or tacos and margaritas, right? So we were definitely bound to hit a brewery with pizza on our list. This pizza + brewery combo was Saucy Brew Works. We’ve been here before right when they opened, and more recently for a foodie event. But we were excited to come back and stuff our faces with lots of different pizzas. And probably some beers.

We had to call in the A-Squad for this assignment, the CraveCle girls! Nikki, Bailey and Maranda describe themselves as “three working Millennials who love to eat and explore new places.”  These girls work hard at their day jobs and play hard too, especially when it comes to food. They are the funnest group of gals with the most different personalities and we all bond over our love of all things food and CLE. Oh and for this trip, Maranda’s boyfriend Matt joined us too!

Nikki describes herself as a pizza aficionado. Her favorite type of pizzas are the “not so basic” ones, the ones with fun toppings. She loves the pizza at Woodstock Cafe in Vermilion, especially the one with artichokes. Bailey is a ride or die type of pizza girl. She always has a frozen pizza in her stash of late night snacks. Her favorite pizza is a good old fashioned cheese pizza. Maranda is a pizza extremist. She craves it all the time and will eat it at all hours of the day. Her favorite pizza is the milk and honey pizza from Vero. Matt is an “all pizzas matter” type of guy. His favorite pizzas are the ones with a sweeter sauce and he loves curled, crispy pepperoni. The gang says they eat pizza once, sometimes twice a week on average.

Saucy Brew Works
Saucy is a huge, open, industrial style yet cozy brewery located in Hingetown. From their website: “The story starts with our Brew Master Eric Anderson and Entrepreneur Brent Zimmerman. Beer fanatics. Always up for adventure. They decided to transform the Steelman Building into the kind of place that delivers nothing less than crazy good beer and legendary good times.”  There’s not a whole lot out there about their food because they focus on their beer, but they serve an array of pizza and you can build your own. They also have other food stuffs too, like sandwiches, apps and salads.

What We Ordered
For the 6 of us we decided to order 5 small pizzas so we could try as many different ones as possible.

• Margherita: saucy red, fresh mozzarella, tomato, basil, pecorino romano.
• Quattro Formaggi: saucy white, parmesan, mozzarella, goat cheese, pecorino romano.
• Supreme: saucy red, mushroom, red onion, garlic, peppers, provolone, pecorino romano, oregano.
• Bees Knees: saucy red, honey, spicy capicola, mozzarella, red pepper flakes.
• Frittata: sriracha, avocado, boursin, bacon, sun dried tomatoes, bourbon maple syrup, egg, mozzarella, parmesan.

This was exactly the right amount of pizza for 6 people.

Sauce
We all had different opinions on sauce! Nikki likes sauce and thought the pizzas could have had more sauce. Maranda agreed that there could have been more sauce, you know with their name being Saucy and all! Bailey thought the sauce level was good and Matt thought the sauce efficient. Broad thought there could have been a bit more sauce, especially on the Margherita pizza but she’s not a sauce person so she’d rather have less sauce than too much sauce. Beard is no sauce person, so these were just right for him.

Crust
Nikki, Bailey, Matt and Broad prefer thin crispier crusts so these crusts held up in comparison but they weren’t the best. Maranda loves all crusts but didn’t love Saucy’s crusts. Beard noticed the under crust definitely depended on the pizza toppings: the more toppings there were, the less crispy the crust, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing! We all agreed that the Formaggi crust was awesome because it ended up having cheese on it and the Supreme was delicious because it was super crispy.

Toppings
Nikki loved the Frittata pizza because the maple and sriracha was such a good and interesting combo. Bailey doesn’t like a lot of toppings, she prefers to keep it simple so the Supreme was too much for her. Broad loved the Supreme, she doesn’t normally like a lot of toppings but with the lack of sauce the amount of toppings on the Supreme made it really tasty.  We all agreed that the Margherita was very underwhelming, but we loved the avocado on the Frittata.

Cheese
The one thing we all agreed on is that there could have been more cheese on the pizzas. We all like a lot of cheese and prefer if its gooey. The cheese on all the pizzas was lacking and a little dry. The Formaggi has the best amount of cheese because it was just cheese on the pizza, but all could have used that amount.

Overall Experience
Nikki liked the ambiance, exposed piping and open concept in the brewery. She would prefer to order at the kitchen or have table service. Bailey on the other hand enjoyed the ordering process and the fun atmosphere. Maranda felt like it wasn’t the best place for a nice dinner out and would prefer table service. Matt liked the overall vibe and thought it was a cool place. We all agreed the speaker system wasn’t that loud and we had trouble hearing our names being called, but it also could have been where we sat.

Next Day Deliciousness
Bailey is the only one who has had the pizza the next day and said it was delicious. We agreed that since our pizzas came out kind of cold and were still tasty we could see it being decent the next day.

Overall Rating
3.5 pints. This was a different kind of pizza experience because it’s in a brewery. It was very noisy and crowded and beer was definitely the focus here. We would have preferred for the pizzas to arrive a bit warmer, but they were tasty and the perfect accompaniment to our beers. If we strictly wanted to go on a pizza date we would go somewhere more pizza focused and somewhere that had a cozier vibe, but for pizza AND a beer this place holds up just fine.