I know there are a handful of pizza farm and pizza pop-ups around the upper Midwest, and it’s because IT’S A GREAT IDEA. Opening your farm or business up for one day a week and making pizza for folks is probably a lot of work, but it’s also great to get people in your doors and into someplace new. This space in Clear Lake, Wisconsin is really a charming place and the amazing pizza and beer were the icing on the cake.
Some details: Only open on Sundays, usually noon to 7. Tons of seating options and you can bring your own chairs and sit on the grass if you want. No outside alcohol and no pets. They have an occasional music festival, but most Sundays, they have live music of some sort.
The Sawmill has a large parking area and good signage so you can figure out where you’re going. There’s one building where you order your pizza from and then another building houses the beers. There’s also another non-attached building that I think houses a sort of events center, but we didn’t really check it out very much – priorities were pizza and beer.
The pizza menu is concise, but not in a bad way – every single one of the 6-8 pizzas sounds great. It isn’t your normal pepperoni or sausage (though you can get cheese if you really need to). With adventurous combinations, you’re going to have to narrow it down to one or two you’d like, which is really helpful since you can do half-and-half, as long as the base sauces are the same. Meaning, red sauce flavors can go with red sauce, but not with white sauce. Thankfully, the folks running the counter at the pizza place are super helpful and will help you get through it all. We got one half Spicy Jameese (tomato sauce, strawberry jam, sriracha, cheddar & pepper cheeses); and one half Wisconsin Luau (tomato sauce, mozz, pepper cheese, Canadian bacon, bacon, and pineapple).
We headed to the beer building and the folks in there were also super happy. When you’re at a place like this, you need to try a couple of beers to make sure you really get it dialed in, and since they don’t do flights, you need to just get full pours to try them out. I started with a Rubus Reamer - a sort of shandy/radler style beer. It was a solid beer, but not exactly what I was looking for, especially after that lime beer. It was a solid B performer. I liked it just fine.
I also thought I’d get a Blimey, which is a lime IPA, and this was a big surprised how awesome it was. Definitely an A beer. Even D.Rough liked this one enough to keep stealing drinks from mine.
Our pizza bell rang and we picked up a really awesome looking pie from the counter. It’s always a good thing when you can’t tell which flavor was your favorite – they were both awesome. And we both kept changing our mind which one we liked the best. The Spicy Jameese wasn’t too spicy, but had some really complementary flavors. The Wisconsin Luau was great, as well, with pork and pineapple. I think we really nailed it with this order and the brewery really came through with the execution on this one. Really pleased with this whole scenario.
I went back to the beer building for a Tipsy Bees, a nice brown ale and I’d give it a solid B (pun intended). Again, I didn't need another one of these, thankfully, since I had already had three.
We had a great visit to the Sawmill and both the pizza and the beer overperformed our expectations. We’d recommend it to everyone and we basically talked about pizza and beer for the remainder of the ride back to the Twin Cities (just over an hour, so not a bad Sunday drive at all!). Glad we checked this place out, finally.
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