Through the unmarked sliding door in the back of a bar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, beer is having the time of its life.

The handsome bar, all reclaimed wood and Carrara marble, is called Tørst – Danish for “thirst” – and the restaurant tucked inside it is Luksus, one of the few Michelin-starred restaurants to offer a beer pairing with its menu.

From a narrow open kitchen, Daniel Burns – an alum of Noma, the Fat Duck and Momofuku – serves modernist Nordic cuisine. “Barely cooked squid with purple potato and dulse powder,” he announces, placing a plate down on the counter that looks like a solar system. It’s standard enough fare at a fine dining joint, but a few moments later a “beer host” named Joey Pepper stops by with a squat bottle with what look like Celtic runes written on it.

“This is Enkir,” he says, “a beer made from an ancient grain by Birra Del Borgo, an Italian craft brewer. It’s a Belgian-style pale ale whose citrus notes complement the maritime flavor of the squid. Enjoy.” Pepper pours the amber beer into delicate stemware and drifts away.

Squid dish at Tørst. Photograph: Signe Birck

Both venues are a collaboration between Burns and a Danish brewer, Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø. Bjergsø runs Evil Twin Brewing Co, a brewery that produces some of the world’s strangest and most sought-after beers in the world. At Luksus, he acts much as a sommelier might, choosing beers that accentuate and ennoble Burns’s cuisine.

That might not seem too revolutionary, but considering how beer is usually treated it’s practically a putsch.

For most of its 10,000 years, beer has been remanded to swigging on its own. But in the last quarter century, with the advent of the gastropub, it has gradually entered into the dining room – mostly in the company of bangers and mash, burgers and fries, or chicken wings. Only in the last few years has beer made significant inroads into the world of fine dining.

The historian Tom Standage, author of The History of the World in Six Glasses, blames the Romans. “The idea of wine correlating with social status is basically a Roman thing,” he explains. It was that ancient august society that popularized beer’s longtime nemesis and carried it in vessels all along the Mediterranean. “They looked down their noses at the beer-drinkers.”

Perhaps they had good reason to. Unlike beer, wine keeps – which means one can sip it and store the rest for later. Beer, on the other hand, goes flat, spoils quickly and must be drunk in one sitting. Not only that, but since beer is made with hardier stuff – malt, hops, yeast and water – it flourished in the colder northern lands, the home of Vandals and Goths. In many ways, the binge-drinking barbarian stigma has stuck.

In the US, some of this is, sadly, the fault of beer itself. The plague of Prohibition exterminated many of the smaller breweries in the 1920s, and when beer reappeared it was a light lager, a featureless watery cipher on to which companies could attach whatever notion of working-class heroes was en vogue. Unsurprisingly, it has done little to endear the beverage to the best US kitchens.

But the geography of beer has been steadily shifting. Fuelled first by small brewers like Anchor Steam in San Francisco in 1965 and Sierra Nevada in Chico, California, in 1979, craft breweries have sprung up, offering beers with deep flavors. Lager no longer is the only option: sour beers, bitter beers, far-out stouts, smoked beers, tart beers, and fruit beers have followed. Today, for example, hop-forward IPAs and sour lambic-styles beers are among the most popular. These are beers with character.

At the same time, the proliferation of craft breweries coincided with the evolving palate of American drinkers, which increased interest into the world of Belgian beers, with their yeasty funk and old-world traditions. And that, in turn, spawned even more homegrown creators.

A Tørst glass. Photograph: Signe Birck

In other words, we are in the golden era of beer – so why not pair it with food?

Matthew Pene is the beer director at Eleven Madison Park, a three-Michelin-star fine-dining restaurant in New York City, where he oversees a list of more than 100 beers. Alongside the restaurant’s wine team, Pene offers beer pairings for chef Daniel Humm’s tasting menus. Though he says all beer pairings are still “relatively slim”, guests who want beer incorporated are growing ever more. “Quite simply,” he says, “there are some flavors, especially roasted ones, for which beer cannot be beat.

“Being the beer director here,” he says, “and having the stature that we do at the restaurant, allows me to gain the trust from our guests. They might not think beer is appropriate in fine dining but they know that we do everything we can to be the best restaurant in the world. If we say beer is going to be a game-changer, they trust me.”

Another challenge is that unlike wine, beer was slow to develop a well-codified, weirdly monastic, centrally administrated service culture. The first guild of modern sommeliers – those guys with the silly silver trays around their neck and who live for blind tastings – was founded in 1907. But it took another hundred years for beer to get its own guild.

Dubbed the Cicerone Certification Program, the course was set up only in 2007 by Chicago beer journalist and educator Ray Daniels. Content manager Pat Fahey explains that Ray “saw there was a need for people selling and serving beer to have some amount of knowledge”. In other words, as beer got better, people had to get better at talking about and serving it.

Like the Court of the Master Sommelier, tests are gruelling and the success rate pitiable. Today there are only 10 master cicerones in the US, though many have tried.

At The Cannibal, the highly rated restaurant in New York City with a 500-strong bottle list, Eric Singer is studying for his own master certification. Already a Level II Cicerone, Singer spends his spare time devising an elaborate scheme for pairing food and beer. “At some restaurants,” he says, “pairings aren’t meant to take risks but here, that’s all I do.”

Singer considers factors like density of flavor, sense of beauty, method of preparation, even infusion of poaching liquid. And, of course, creativity. On a recent evening, he paired a 50-day dry-aged ribeye steak with an Oyster Stout, a dark beer made with oystershells. “It’s the surf in surf-and-turf,” he explains.

“The pairing might be unusual, but my job here blows minds.”

Four tips on pairing food with beer

Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø curated the beer list at Noma, has collaborated with chefs such as Danny Bowien of Mission Chinese and Grant Achatz at Alinea, and runs Evil Twin Brewing Co. Here are his tips for exploring beer-and-food pairings. “At its heart,” he says, “it isn’t that dissimilar from thinking about wine pairings. They’re both about creating mutually beneficial relationships.”

A bottle of Femme Fatale. Photograph: Signe Birck

The beer should look like the food

As in wine pairings, where you wouldn’t choose a crisp white wine to go with a steak, in beer you want the color of the beer to match the food. Lighter beers, like witbiers and IPAs, go well with seafood dishes while darker beers, like stouts and porters, generally pair better with meat. This is especially true with roast meat in which the roasted barley of a stout acts as an echo for the caramelization of the protein.

Match body to body

As a general rule – though one with many exceptions – the lighter the beer, in terms of alcohol-by-volume, the lighter the body will be. At Luksus we try to pair well-balanced relatively low ABV pale ales with our more refined delicate dishes so the beer doesn’t tread on the flavors of the food.

Complement or contrast

There is no right or wrong pairing. There are only choices that make more or less sense. One of the most helpful questions is whether you want to complement or contrast the flavors of the food. For instance, if you’re thinking of a pairing for a chocolate brownie, the classic complementary pairing might be an Imperial Stout, which can itself taste chocolatey. On the other hand, a crisp effervescent saison might cut through the dense richness of the brownie. Both are right but contain very different dynamics.

Go wild

Beer should cost much more than it does. That it is still affordable means you can experiment with a lot of different choices and not incur much cost. There are countless beers out there and huge variation in terms of style and fermentation. Choose a style and explore it from the inside out. Experiment with a couple of different pairings per dish until you find one that works for you. At the very worst, you’ll just have a lot of really good beer to drink.