Conversation With Brandt Bishop of Best Slope Pizza

Concept:

We’re a mobile Neapolitan pizzeria. We are willing to come virtually anywhere, and I’ve built out some different setups where we can set up under a tent. Soon, I’ll have a pizza trailer we’ll be pulling around with portable ovens in a fixed location. Most of our public-facing events are driven around partnerships with breweries, wineries, tap rooms. There’s a couple hip little hotels that we’ve partnered with.

Pizza style & dough:

I would call it a hybrid. It has 3.5 percent by weight sourdough levain in it, but I’m also pitching in fractions of a percent of commercial yeast. Sourdough purists sometimes scoff at that, but our position is it helps with both the elasticity and the flavor. And there’s a noticeable difference side by side.

I’m very much into sourdough and nurture it and culture it. I’ve had it for six or seven years and had a pop-up sourdough bakery concept previous to this, where I was able to bring the levain with me.

You use water treated with reverse osmosis to make your dough. What kind of difference has that made in your pizzas?

We have exceptionally poor quality water here from a taste and residual minerals perspective. I started initially making my pizza dough with that and eventually switched.

We get this reverse osmosis water at the grocery store and just refill our jug. I’m a bit of a nerd, and I started to look into what minerals would be associated with different areas.

I started to learn about New York City pizza and the water there. And I think there’s some science that would suggest minerality plays a role in the fermentation consistency throughout the ferment – and, also, to a small level in the flavor.

And so, I started looking into what the water is like in Naples, because I’m making Neapolitan dough, not New York. I saw that this water that filters up through black lava rock comes in with certain profiles of magnesium and certain other trace minerals. And I started looking into how I could emulate that. It’s as simple as fractions of a gram … so that it’s not a vacant vessel with a reverse osmosis that doesn’t have any minerality.

Did you notice a difference in the fermentation?

I did. I’ve done it over time now and really measured the results, and I get longer, more consistent fermentation. I’m usually only serving in the five- to seven-day window on those weekends after starting on a Monday. But for me, if I take dough home, for example, I catalog what’s going on with it, and then I start making bread.

I can get this dough and still make pizza at day 10-11, where I never could have done that before. It would have just blown out of its container.

Another nerdy practice that I have imparted for the pop-up life and for working outside all the time is I put my dough balls in individual containers. They’re black to-go containers with lids, and then those get stored in my cooler, because on a 100-degree day, I’m not going to end up with a dough monster in the tray. Within those dough containers, you really get to see the growth – and a lot of times, the lid will hold as they grow out.

Since you have a mobile business, how do you handle the off-season in Colorado?

This winter, in hopes of minimizing the physical toll and staying a little closer to home, we’re going to be doing two Fridays at a local tap room, two Saturdays at my commercial kitchen, where I’ll try to foster its own identity as a pop-up space. I’ve done a supper club there once a month the past two winters, and so the idea will be to iterate on the supper club and do a pizza club.

In the winter months, at the same location where the supper club is, I’ll offer pickup for my frozen pizzas. If leftover dough comes home, I’ll bust out a bunch of skins with tomato or garlic sauce par-cooked. Then, I’ll top them with raw toppings and hard freeze. They get cryovaced, and then I sell those for pickups on Thursdays.

I’m going to try and diversify that a little bit and offer an Italian prepared meal in tandem with the frozen pizzas, so I can capitalize on this sleepy little area where we live, where folks might not be so inclined to come out on a Saturday.

I have this grand vision of a day where I open up for an event at my commercial kitchen. I have my prepared meals; I have frozen pizzas. You come for a night of pizza, and then you kind of walk through our prepared meals area … appeal to the shopper at the end of the event after a couple glasses of wine.

Read the December 2025 Issue of Pizza Today Magazine

It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for all year! The 2026 Pizzeria Industry Trends Report is finally here, and there is disruption on the Top 10 list of most popular pizza styles. Find out what toppings made the cut, along with how consumer confidence and marketing trends will shape your business in the coming year. Plus, learn how to deal with prickly customers, adopt pizza styles from across the world and fall in love with your business numbers. This issue is full of data-based insights you won’t want to miss.

Check out the full Digital Edition – Pizza Today December 2025.