You call this a beer?

BEER lovers, don’t despair. So what if a new Gallup Poll delivered the ominous news that wine has finally caught up, and may now surpass, beer as America’s favorite alcoholic beverage? That doesn’t tell the whole story.

Beer has a friendly challenger too: beer itself. That is, the more flavorful and adventurous drink we call craft beer is gaining ground on common beer faster than anything else, wine included.

In 2004, the quickest-growing segment of the alcoholic beverage industry in the U.S. was craft beer, not wine. Earlier this year it was reported that craft beer sales grew 7%. That turns out to be more than twice the 2.7% increase in wine or the 3.1% growth in spirits, according to the Colorado-based Brewers Assn.

The explanation? Craft beer is getting better all the time, not to mention sometimes more deliciously wild than ever imagined. This summer, for instance, one brewer was so proud of his new 50-proof beer that he cracked the $100-a-bottle price barrier -- and that’s without a single bubble of carbonation or a trace of the familiar foamy head. Think Cognac, not Coors.

The “revolution” in American craft brewing is now a generation old. But rather than growing cautious with success, brewers seem ever more adventurous; they’re pushing their beers into realms never imagined. At the same time, beer drinkers are becoming more appreciative and similarly daring.

Something else has been occurring too. As if in anticipation of the Gallup numbers, those who love beer are out to challenge wine on its home turf: the dinner table. Pairing beer with food has long been part of the brew-pub culture, but increasingly it is an idea being tried out on white tablecloths.

“For the last 18 months or so, we’ve been trying to really spread the word,” says Ray Daniels, director of marketing for the Brewers Assn. “What we’re seeing is that it’s finally broken through -- food and beer pairings are no longer just something within the industry. Chefs have taken up the idea, and so have culinary schools.”

Don’t get too carried away just yet.

Although home cooks have better choices because supermarkets have expanded their selections of more flavorful beers, it’s likely to be a while before diners can expect their favorite restaurants to greet them with competing sommeliers, one for beer and one for wine. But the idea isn’t laughable anymore.

Traveling around town recently, one could taste the creative ferment behind fine beer.

For more than a decade, Jim Koch of the Boston Brewing Co. has been in the vanguard of redefining our very concept of what beer can be. Beginning in 1993 with Samuel Adams Triple Bock, he has been ratcheting up the alcohol and flavor concentrations in small batches of limited-edition brews that have come to be known in the industry as “extreme beers.”

This summer he did it again. His brewers unveiled the 2005 edition of the brandy-colored, sharply aromatic and seriously alcoholic Sam Adams Utopias. A blind tasting was held in Santa Monica as part of a nine-city series for the media and distributors.

This was not your ordinary tasting.

Here was an uncarbonated after-dinner beer put up against two of the best digestifs the wine world has produced: Taylor Fladgate 1994 Vintage Porto from Portugal and Martell X.O. Supreme Cognac from France.

It was a moment to spin a beer drinker’s head.

When words fail

FOR one thing, most hop-heads lack the vocabulary to discuss beer -- beer, mind you -- in the wine-and-spirits vernacular necessary to convey a sense of Utopias: “warm, burnished, caramelized apples, tarte Tatin, oloroso Sherry ... silkier than Madeira but less velvety than tawny Port ... odors of Sherry and fortified wine, some residual sugar sweetness ... a fine, slightly malty, lingering finish

Let’s face it, except for the last remark, beer drinkers don’t tend to talk that way. For another thing, are we ready to drink our beer at room temperature in petite brandy glasses, a tiny sip at a time to finish off a five-course dinner? Clean our plates and then have a beer? Really.

Utopias is a beer created to make a point. It claims the record as the most potent beer brought to market, at 25% alcohol, or 50 proof. Only 8,000 individually numbered 750-milliliter, kettle-shaped bottles were produced, and while they are available, they cost $100 to $119 retail.

Although it looks and tastes far more like fortified wine than what we know as beer, Utopias is no pretender. It is brewed like other beers from beer ingredients -- water, malted barley, hops and several types of yeast, including yeast normally used in Champagne, with the addition of maple syrup. Utopias is then aged in oak bourbon barrels to draw out the flavor.

But what about carbonation? Doesn’t beer need at least a little fizz to deserve the name? Not, it seems, if you don’t want it to. You can think of it this way: Most cars are painted, but if you produce one without paint it’s still a car.

A very different slant on craft brewing could be found across town at Long Beach’s Belmont Brewing Co. The brew pub’s recent monthly tasting dinner for 100 buffs featured beer from Firestone Walker Brewing Co. of Paso Robles.

David Walker, president of the brewery, is in quest of the opposite kind of extreme: The extreme of refinement, or balance, in a beverage that is immediately recognizable as our old friend beer, fizzy and chilled.

Firestone’s Double Barrel Ale, which has been winning medals for four years now, also relies on the unusual process of casking a portion of each batch in oak barrels during fermentation. The result offers hints of what happens to wine during cask aging, with oak imparting flavor and smoothness to the liquid.

Firestone classifies this ale as akin to an English-style bitter or an American amber. Cordovan in color, it is a full-bodied, 5% alcohol beer in which a spicy bite of dry hops is held in check by plentiful, bread-like malt, leaving behind a pleasant, toasted aftertaste.

Whenever he can, Walker attends events like this one so he can champion the idea of fine beer as a proper accompaniment to food. “It’s something that you have to do one person at a time,” he says.

The weak point with this theory, however, is that a five-course, five-beer brew pub dinner priced at $40 simply cannot be expected to provide the kind of cooking that would give the best of good beers a fighting chance to surprise you.

For that, one needs a beer fanatic who also happens to have a flair for the kitchen, someone like Sang Yoon, a widely traveled chef who now is proprietor of the Santa Monica pub Father’s Office. At a private Westside kitchen, Yoon recently cooked a lavish dinner for friends and journalists to show off a few of Europe’s more fanciful beers.

Take Schlenkerla Rauchbier, a German lager difficult to find on these shores and just as difficult to drink, at least by itself. An intensely smoked, oleaginous brew, it brings to mind bacon drippings served cold.

But Yoon paired it with braised baby back ribs and a bean-bacon ragout. Soon hands were reaching across tables for more. The smokiness of the brew melted into meat and beans as neatly as a slab of butter rides off on a toasted baguette.

Yoon paired a delicate Belgian-style white beer, Unibroue Blanche de Chambly, with seared bluefin tuna under a ginger-wasabi sauce with creme fraiche -- and you would have thought his guests were teenagers tearing into food after school. The citrus tang of the beer added voltage to the fish and cultured cream.

A rock shrimp ceviche likewise vanished in the company of a sharp and yeasty Deus Brut des Flandres. This aged French ale, vintage 2002, delivered high acidity and background flavors of clove and coriander -- notes that intensified the shrimp’s Asian herb and fruit marinade.

Dinner music

PERHAPS his wittiest pairing was simple culinary deconstruction. Yoon brought to the table a Belgian lambic, a wildly fermented sour wheat beer that is usually tamed in the bottle with an infusion of fruit. In this case, the chef served a plain, no-fruit Girardin Gueuze Lambic. On the side came a dish of fresh berries with a swirl of cream. Combined, the two re-created a fruit lambic in the form of dessert.

This was the beer experience in another realm -- an all-out jam session between complementary flavors at the junction of fork and glass. Wine can hit some fine high notes indeed, but it cannot make dinner music quite like this. If wine plays in the classical register, this meal delivered South Side jazz.

Gallup was no doubt correct in charting changes in our drinking habits, and heaven knows that wine aficionados have had a giddy time trying to wring portent from the finding. But as with all surveys, the results were no better than the questions posed.

Gallup didn’t ask how many American beer drinkers are drinking better beer. Nor how many Americans are getting better at drinking beer, for that matter.

The fact is, many of us are consuming less and wanting to make more of it. To ignore beer in that mix is to risk being left behind. The light, sudsy thirst quencher of summer afternoons now wears white tie and tails when the occasion calls for it.

At the tasting of Sam Adams Utopias, comments were mixed. Some drinkers preferred the Cognac. Others liked the aged Port. Many favored the Sam.

The astonishing thing about it was that in a roomful of people guided only by their taste, no one spoke up to say that this newest expression of beer was out of place in dainty stemmed glasses alongside such noble elixirs.