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The restaurant game seems to be almost as faddish as the rag trade. Seemingly out of nowhere a new fashion appears and, before you know it, it headlines every menu.

At the moment it seems as though you can’t go anywhere without falling over beetroot this or goat’s curd that. What’s more, it’s all being served on a slab of wood rather than an oversized round plate. Two years ago was stuffed zucchini flowers served on a rectangle plate. A decade ago everything was covered with roasted pine nuts and probably served on some kind of a burnt orange plate.

Food fashions are wonderful in that they constantly introduce new flavours and techniques, some of which prove lasting, and ensure that dining is interesting and fun. However, the slavish adherence to fashion often also sees the baby thrown out with the bathwater in the quest for the Next Big Thing.

Wine varietals often suffer from this faddishness and too many people these days turn their noses up at a good Chardonnay because “that’s soooo 1999”.

While fashions can excite, slavish adherence to them often just shows a me-too mindset that simply reveals a lack of imagination and originality.

The flipside of faddishness is overlooking the inherent qualities in something everyday, or looking at it with a jaundiced eye and ignoring it entirely. For me, beer falls into this category.

Over the last decade there has been a huge growth in what we have taken to calling ‘craft’ beer. Craft beer is beer made on a smaller scale and with a greater emphasis on showing the nuances and flavours of its ingredients. In flavour terms, craft beer is to mainstream lagers what a farmhouse cheese is to plastic wrapped singles.

While there is a huge spectrum of flavours and styles available, many restaurant owners and chefs see beer as the Rodney Dangerfield of beverages and pay it no respect. This was never more clearly demonstrated to me than in a discussion I had with a well-known chef who had spent just five minutes extolling the virtues of his sourdough breads (another recent food fad). When I asked him about beer and food, he dismissed it with a curt “I don’t drink much of it”, said in a way that he wouldn’t condescend to such pedestrian beverages.

But hold on. His sourdough bread is made with water, grains and yeast. Beer is made with exactly the same ingredients, only with the addition of hops and far more varieties of yeast and grain than bread. These can be blended to derive even more flavour combinations and styles than there are breads. This chef saw beer as the equal of a supermarket-bought white loaf, failing to see that, as with his sourdough, in the hands of a craftsman it can also be much, much more.

Beer is still seen by most of our restaurateurs as a pale fizzy drink, to be offered on arrival to wet the whistle before patrons move onto the serious business of wine. Beers, when they’re set out in the beverage list, are relegated to the end as if in some kind of grown-up’s kiddy menu.

Beer will never have the cachet that wine enjoys, and should never adopt wine’s pomposity. But still, as craft brewers rediscover and adapt old styles and experiment with new ingredients and techniques, the flavours they are producing partner with an extraordinarily wide, and often surprising, range of foods. What’s more, an intelligent use of these beers provides exactly the sort of excitement that diners are seeking and restaurateurs want to offer.

All they need to do is look at it with fresh eyes.

Top restaurant crimes against beer:

1. Thinking you have a good beer list when you simply offer 10 different brands of lager. Unless you would confine your wine list to 10 different Sauvignon Blancs, you should show a little more imagination.

2. Selling your beer list to one brewer in return for some umbrellas, staff uniforms and branded glassware. Big brewers are interested in pushing their preferred brand, not serving your diners or adding interest and colour to your menu.

3. Listing Becks, Stella, Heineken, Kronenburg, Kirin, Asahi and any number of other nearly-identical lagers as ‘imports’. While the brands are international, most of these are brewed-under-licence in Australia. There is nothing wrong with that, but they’re just not ‘imported’ or ‘international’. Chefs have over 100 different words to describe different sauces; surely they can find one to accurately describe their beer list.

4. Boasting about having ‘genuine’ imports for the beers listed in 3 above. As a rule lagers don’t travel well. Even when it’s directly imported, beer can spend up to 6 weeks in a shipping container crossing the Equator to get here. When it’s parallel imported it takes even longer and no-one has any idea where it’s been and for how long. Unless you would brag about storing your restaurant’s XXXX in the boot of your car for 6 weeks, don’t brag about selling ‘genuine’ Heineken.

5. Serving the beer in a stubby. While for some reason many diners prefer to drink out of the stubby, restaurants should always at least offer a glass. If a beer is worth drinking, it’s worth drinking from a glass, especially beers with flavour.

Anyone who has looked at the badges on the taps of their local will have noticed that the days of walking into a bar and asking for a pot of ‘heavy’ or ‘Gold’ are well and truly over.

Such are the beer drinking options available today that many are starting to worry that beer is going down the path of wine and becoming a bit of a poser’s drink, something consumed by over styled metrosexuals in effete inner city bars.

Fosters tried to capitalise on this perception to restore the fortunes of its fast-flagging VB brand last year when it ran a series of ads to the tune of Neil Diamond’s song ‘Hello again’, poking fun at blokes who use hand cream, wear lycra and, presumably, drink craft beer.

It didn’t stop the sales slide for the once dominant national brand.

Perhaps the best gauge as to how broadly craft beer has spread is that one of South-East Queensland’s best beer bars can now be found at Yamanto, near Ipswich.

The Yamanto Tavern started testing the craft beer waters last year putting on a pale ale made by local brewer Wade Curtis’ 4 Hearts Brewing. So well did his 4 Degrees Pale Ale go down with the locals that Yamanto is now extending the bar and will soon offer 24 different craft beers on tap.

Yamanto’s manager Peter Coultas said that the response to his beer offering has been overwhelming.

“We gave Wade’s pale ale a try and it just took off,” he said.

“These days when our regulars come in and ask for ‘a pot of 4’ they mean 4 Hearts Pale Ale not Fourex.”

“It gave us confidence to fill our fridges with other beers and put them on tap, and our customers love it.

“We recently took all of the mainstream beers off tap and didn’t have a complaint.”

Peter said the biggest surprise was the wide range of people that they had attracted with their beer selection.

“We recently had a group of ladies in their 60s come in holding an ad we had run in the local paper advertising the beers,” he laughed.

“They wanted to try them and they spent an afternoon drinking Stone & Wood’s Pacific Ale.

“Craft beer doesn’t have a specific demographic, everyone seems to get excited about it.”

The Yamanto has gone from just offering beer to offering tasting paddles that feature three beer samples with three matching food samples.

And the best thing is there’s no need for you to sport a hipster moustache or use hand cream to get into the Yamanto …you just need to be game to try some new beers.

The dubious ad for Crown Lager

Mainstream beer marketing can be tough. Like petrol, trying to distinguish a product that is largely identical to a competitor’s is difficult. Unlike petrol, Brewers want to avoid having to compete on price.

Brewers try to make their product memorable and build an emotional attachment with consumers through a number of devices. The most successful are where they create ads that engage and entertain and some of the funniest and most memorable television commercials are for beer. Just think of Carlton Draught’s ‘Big Ad’ or VB’s ‘The Regulars’.

Things can get a little stickier when marketers try to differentiate what is actually in the bottle. When you stop and look at their tag lines and descriptions such as ‘double hopped’, ‘chill filtered’ and ‘naturally brewed’, they are fairly generic, sometimes meaningless, statements. Then again they probably barely register with consumers when they sidle up to the bar.

Other marketing claims can confuse beer drinkers about what is in their glass and how it got there. A new campaign from Crown Lager, Australia’s best-selling premium beer, strays into this territory.

Centred on the time it takes to make the beer, the ad boasts it takes twice as long as its mainstream stablemates to mature. This sounds impressive, but we’ll never know. Fosters are reluctant to disclose how long Crown or its stablemates are actually brewed for to enable genuine comparisons between beers to be made. However, as a mainstream lager it is a fraction of the time taken by many of the smaller brewers cropping up these days.

The most confusing element of the campaign though is the tagline: Time. The fifth ingredient. Many beers use only malt, water, hops and yeast, and these are the ingredients trumpeted in the famous German beer purity law. Crown’s campaign would seem to suggest it only has these four ingredients, with time being the full stop in the sentence.  Anyone visiting the product website is likely to have this impression confirmed as it proclaims Crown is made using “the finest barley, yeast, water and Pride of Ringwood hops”.

It’s not a correct assumption though. Like many beers, Crown also uses a substantial percentage of cane sugar in brewing. There’s nothing wrong with that and it’s a commonly used brewing adjunct, but not one that brewers tend to shout about because of the sub-premium perception it can create. These days many small brewers make an asset of the fact that their beers are all-malt and made without the use of cane sugar.

None of this changes how the beer tastes of course, but if you think marketing should tell the full story it may leave a bad taste.