We've got a mixed six-pack of beer items this week, and the first one is about one of the, uh, more unusual brews out there.

Pizza Beer.

It's beer with the pizza right in it.

Or, at least some of the pizza.

As you may have seen in a short item we ran in this space earlier this summer, Mamma Mia! Pizza Beer is brewed by Sprecher Brewery in Glendale, Wis., for the Illinois home-brewing couple who developed it. Tom and Athena Seefurth say the beer is brewed with fresh tomato, oregano, basil and garlic.

Our informal taste panel wasn't thrilled with it on its own, but the "culinary beer" is meant for drinking with food and for cooking (pizza dough, sausage and more). This week it arrived in the Pittsburgh area, where the 16-ounce (at least for now) bottles are being distributed by Millvale's Vecenie Distributing -- to pizza shops and elsewhere.

Read up on it at mammamiapizzabeer.com.

The Three Rivers Beer Club will hold its second tasting from 6 to 8 p.m. tonight at Allegheny HYP Club, Downtown. The theme is autumn beers; they'll taste four or five, including Screamin' Pumpkin, paired with appetizers, including miniature pumpkin pies. Cost is $15. Get details, RSVP and check out the first newsletter (it has a nice article about the Three Rivers Underground Brewers Oct. 18 "Brewing Up a Cure" fund-raiser for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation) at maltdaddy.com. Organizer J.P. McCarty says some 70 people have joined his club, about which we recently wrote.

TRUB's beer festival lets you support its good cause and sample more than 30 homemade plus commercial brews and food from local restaurants, and you get chances to bid on and win beer-y prizes for $30 (brewingupacure.org).

Also tonight, starting at 6 p.m., hop on out to Kelly's Bar and Lounge in East Liberty for the pay-as-you-drink celebration of wet-hopped brews -- made with fresh, instead of dried, hops -- by local brewers including the Church Brew Works, East End Brewing, Red Star Brewing, Rivertowne Pour House. East End's Scott Smith advises, "Tell 'em to come early and choose fast! Last year, they were just slammed there, and nearly all the beer was gone in like two or three hours."

Meanwhile, California's Sierra Nevada Brewing makes a wet-hopped brew each year called Sierra Nevada Harvest Ale that is being tapped tonight at Mad Mex restaurants.

(Speaking of hops, one of my favorite beers, period, is in season: Samuel Adams Hallertau Imperial Pilsner, which the Boston brewer describes as made with "enormous, almost reckless, quantities of the Hallertau Mittelfrueh hop, a rare Bavarian Noble hop variety prized for its distinct taste and aroma." It's not cheap -- the 12-ounce bottles are sold in four-packs that retail for $10 -- but is it ever good.)

Sample beer and wine and listen to live music at businesses on the Mt. Lebanon main drag, Washington Road, during "Uptown Rocks," from 7 to 9:30 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are $15 in advance and are available at Empire Music, Avalon Exchange and Molly Brannigans (where you can get tickets that night and join the afterparty; 412-341-7827). Expect iconic Irish brews, plus Sam Adams Oktoberfest, and Barefoot wines.

Author Brian Yaeger will be at Church Brew Works in Lawrenceville next Thursday to sign his book about breweries. For his master's degree, he wrote a thesis on beer.

Next Thursday, you can meet Brian Yaeger, who traveled around the country visiting breweries, including Pennsylvania's Yuengling, and made a book out of it, the new "Red, White and Brew: An American Beer Odyssey (St. Martin's Griffin, $14.95). He'll be at the Church Brew Works in Lawrenceville, signing and presumably sipping, starting at 7 p.m. The San Franciscan got a master's in professional writing from the University of Southern California with a thesis on beer. Check him and the book out at beerodyssey.com.

For Halloween, you could array yourself as a charitable Belgian beer drinker: Starting at 6 p.m. on Oct. 31, Morton's The Steakhouse, Downtown, is hosting a tasting of Chimay, the Belgian ale brewed by Trappist monks and introduced to this country 25 years ago.

Guided by a brand rep, attendees will sample three different Chimays -- Premiere red ale, Grand Reserve brown ale and Cinq Cents blonde -- accompanied by petite filet mignon sandwiches, tuna tartare canapes, sliced smoked salmon and the restaurant's Legendary Hot Chocolate Cake. Tickets are $45 per person, which includes tax, gratuity, a Chimay goblet and a $5 donation to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. For tickets and info call 412-261-5055.