Meet Andrea Frigerio, a trained chef and Brewmaster of Birra Roma Chiara. From cooking at home in Italy with family, and spending weekends and long summers working in his aunt’s restaurant, to studying food science at school, and finally becoming a chef, Andrea has spent most of his life around food.
Andrea is absolutely fascinated with the different types of food that people eat, but mostly about the many different flavours of food and how to best mix those flavours to come up with new flavours. It was this passion, which when he started brewing beer as a hobby, set him out on his path to becoming a brew master for the Birradamare brewery near the ancient port of Rome on ‘Isola Sacra’, and going on to create Birra Roma Chiara.
- Where did your love of flavour start?
-
In Italy it’s easy to be surrounded by flavours from when you are a child, from smelling the vegetables being grown in your grandfather’s garden to then being cooked by your grandmother, and you grow up with a lot of flavour which like colour you see everywhere, you smell everywhere and it’s so fascinating.
- When did you start cooking?
-
I started cooking when I was 14 years old, which was the time I started studying to become a chef. Then I would help my parents cooking at home, as well as every weekend and summer working in my aunt’s restaurant; it was hard, but cooking was just something that I loved to do.
- What is your favourite dish to cook?
-
One of the best ingredients to use for Italian cooking is pork – together with pasta. I love the smell when it’s cooking, the taste, and the crunchiness. And both are the basis for most Roman dishes – of course you must add pepper and cheese – but together you can create the core range of pasta dishes.
- What sort of kitchen did you work in?
-
I typically worked in small kitchens, focused on cooking traditional dishes but serving the types of dishes that have something say; it’s important to taste with your eyes and to see what you are eating before you do, and I worked in restaurants where presentation was just as important as the food itself.
- Do you have a favourite beer?
-
Well, I think that pilsner is my favourite beer of all time, but specifically I like the Bohemian pilsner. More importantly, Pilsner is the beer type which created the revolution for the modern brewing industry. 200 years ago, most beers were darker in colour and had a very different taste to the modern beers we have today; they were likely to have been cloudy and a result would be served in covered glasses so you couldn’t see what you were drinking. The arrival of the Pilsner changed everything.
- What sorts of food does Birra Roma Chiara pair with?
-
Birra Roma Chiara is versatile, with different flavours and different intensity of those flavours, the beer changes itself to pair with them perfectly. And importantly, It enhances the flavours of the food you’re eating.
- What’s your perfect dish to have with Birra Roma Chiara?
-
It must be a pasta-based dish, with tomato and of course pork, so I’ll say a traditional Roman lasagna. It’s something which is a complete dish, there are all sorts of flavours already in the dish (such as the sweetness of the pasta and the acidity of the tomato sauce), and the beer has been made to complement them all (the bitterness of the beer cleanses the palate without overpowering the flavours) and it doesn’t fill you up whilst you’re eating. Also, lasagna is something which is good to cook – especially when cooked properly for around 8 hours – as you can get together with family, everyone can do a different part of the cooking, you can chat and have a few beers whilst you do it.
