Beer has been enjoyed with food for thousands of years. And then suddenly, somewhere in the middle of the 20^th century, most of us simply stopped doing it.

The explosion in ‘New World’ wine was partly to blame but the rot had set in long before that. Wine successfully traded on its reputation as a symbol of culture, inviting drinkers to join its elite club for the entry fee of a bottle of Bordeaux, cleverly creating demand by limiting supply, pushing ‘terroir’ and selling ‘status’.

The beer industry on the other hand took the other path. In a rush for profits it started cannibalising itself, with the large national breweries buying up the smaller regional set-ups.

Beer's reputation as a drink to enjoy with food got lost in all the macho marketing hype.

They in turn were devoured by international brewing conglomerates who pumped out beers so bland it was easy pickings for the wine aficionados. They gleefully turned their collective noses up at beer and delighted in telling us that wine was the natural partner to good food.

They had a point.

Sure there were some countries, some beer bastions, where beer continued to be enjoyed with food.  In Britain it has always been popular to have a pint of bitter with a traditional ploughman’s pub lunch. In Belgium the combination of mussels with the zany gueuze style of beer is still a national treasure, while bratwurst with malty märzen beers is a patriotic pleasure still enjoyed by a lot of Germans.

But the majority of us believed the word on the grapevine. Beer’s relationship with food was downgraded to TV dinners while wine was served in the world’s most exclusive restaurants.

But as in most good stories it is always darkest before the dawn. When the sun rose over California in the US in the mid 70s it heralded the start of a beer revolution by a few pioneering brewers who said enough was enough.

Tired with drinking tasteless beer and watching beer’s reputation drain away they started on the long journey of reclaiming beer as a drink of real character.

Since then a new generation of craft breweries around the world have risen up, producing adventurous, creative, delicious beers that when matched with food can turn good meals into great ones. At the same time we’ve started to rediscover the pleasures of matching ‘old world’ beers with food again.

Tomorrow – I give tips on how to pair food with beer,  matching strengths, finding harmonies and comparing and contrasting flavours.

In recent years wine has become the de facto drink at the dinner table. But it wasn’t always that way.

For centuries it was beer that was the preferred tipple at the table, proudly served with food way back, in fact, before the discovery that grapes could be transformed into wine.

In many countries a man’s worth was measured by the quality of the beer he poured at his table. In northern Europe, where beer was more popular than in the warmer grape-producing regions, wine was something to be sneered at and looked down upon.

But even here wine’s reputation as the perfect partner to food began to grow. Society’s great and good hailed wine’s extraordinary ability to complement the very finest of foods, the media got caught up in the whole story and beer’s illustrious past was quickly forgotten and it found itself hastily relegated from fine dining restaurants to fast food joints.

This is how many of us imagine wine and food.

There’s no doubt the wine industry in recent decades has done a remarkable job of associating their wares with quality cuisine. Take the mantra “red wine with meat and white wine with fish”. It’s ingrained in your mind too isn’t it? Even though you’ve probably no idea how it got there. It’s been repeated so many times that it’s now become a widely accepted truth, like bad things coming in threes and the grass always being greener on the other side.

Conversely the beer industry in recent years has, by its own admission, done a pretty lousy job of telling us any different, preferring to spend its marketing millions on targeting loutish young male sports fans rather than foodies.

In all but a scant few countries beer has become the drink equivalent of sliced bread – universally available and utterly forgettable. It is now commonly chugged from cans while watching the big match and downed in burp-inducing quantities with pizzas and other fast food.

And this is what many of us eat when we drink beer.....

Beer has taken on the role of your ugly best mate. You like to spend time with beer and have fun when you’re with your other friends and their ugly best mates but you would never take him home and show him off to your parents or invite him to a dinner party.

No, no. That’s when you bring your friend wine along. Wine makes you look good you see, more sophisticated, more refined, more grown-up.

The truth is our brains have been ‘wine-washed’. We stopped questioning a long time ago whether wine actually deserved to be served with every course. We’ve just accepted that it must be right because everyone else is doing it.

However right now there are some new whispers going around the dinner table. People are starting to talk ever more loudly about a new generation of beers with characters and flavours that many wines are finding hard to match. Beer, it seems, is on everyone’s lips these days.

Coming tomorrow…..

Things get worse before they get better but beer finally starts to makes a comeback at the dinner table.