I set out as a single-minded investigative reporter, my mission to determine if beer-by-the-bottle (or on tap) was a smarter choice in restaurants than wine-by-the-glass. Less than two weeks later, I found myself sitting in Café D’Alsace on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, eating escargots and moules frites, happily swilling glass-after-glass of palate-altering ales and lagers, many of them made in America. I was literally foaming at the mouth with pleasure.

Allow me to reveal a great truth: I have seen the future, and sometimes it makes you belch.

By profession and by choice, I have been a wine guy. Until Sam Adams, the Boston lager, was created in the eighties, I probably hadn’t drunk a dozen glasses of beer in my life. I didn’t like the taste of beer and I thought less of the culture of beer, which featured Germans lounging in lederhosen and Americans participating in pub crawls.

Sam Adams, creamier and more palatable than any beer I’d tasted, got my attention and upped my consumption to about a half-dozen bottles a year. Then, in the 21st century (thank goodness we have something to like about the 21st century) the craft beer movement came into our lives. Right now, nothing in America in the field of food-and-drink is as impressive and as ambitious as what is taking place with beer.

I didn’t know that when I set out on my investigation. I was motivated primarily by the unseemly prices of wine-by-the-glass in New York restaurants, Bourgogne Blanc for $20, Côtes du Rhône for $17. In effect, what restaurants do is buy passable wine at wholesale prices and charge the price they paid for the bottle for every glass they sell. Wine-by-the glass is not about pleasing customers; it’s about thrilling bookkeepers.

At the same time, I had begun seeing fascinating beers, although I couldn’t tell you much about them except that they cost as little as $6 a glass, $7 a bottle. As I said, I was a beer novice, and I suppose I still am, although I must have tasted close to a hundred beers in that two-week span.

I now know a little something about beer: There are lagers, probably at their best in Germany. There are ales, probably at their best in Belgium, although that statement will surely annoy the Brits. Every other kind of beer is a subcategory. The craft beers made in America tend to be ales. That’s as much data as I feel qualified to pass along.

Back when I was still in investigative mode, I started my research at Buvette, a sweet (if pricy) Greenwich Village spot recently opened by Jody Williams. It has little tables to hold little dishes, most of them tasty—a special of rabbit in mustard sauce is particularly alluring, should it be offered when you go there. I first looked at the wines-by-the-glass. That required scanning the entire list because they aren’t listed separately. Call that wine annoyance number one. (I learned later that some were behind me on a blackboard I couldn’t see.) I selected and ordered three glasses of wine.

Ten minutes later, the waiter returned to say he didn’t have two of them. Wine annoyance number two. He recommended substitutes. I agreed, not wanting to go through the list again. He came back with the three bottles and three empty glasses—pouring wines tableside is a nice touch. The first, an Alsatian Riesling that had replaced the unavailable Italian Sylvaner, was corked, and horribly so. Wine annoyance number three. What was more dreadful is the bottle wasn’t full, which meant the restaurant had already served a glass of this undrinkable wine to some other person. That’s not annoying; that’s appalling.