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The imbibers at Foothills Brewing in Winston-Salem aren't swirling or spitting. But neither are they chugging. Rather they are engaged in quiet conversation over lentil soup, with 6-ounce glasses of gold, red and black ales next to them.

One could be forgiven for thinking they'd mistakenly stumbled on a wine tasting. But the monthly beer dinners at Foothills offer a glimpse at the brewing world's quest for refinement.

"More and more people are viewing beer as not just something to tailgate with or to throw back," said Sarah Bartholomaus, who, with her husband Jamie, runs Foothills. "I feel people are moving beyond just the American-style Miller Lites or Bud Lights and appreciating finer ingredients and more complex styles. Beer is a more respected beverage now."

Local breweries, such as Liberty Steakhouse in High Point, Natty Greene's in Greensboro and Red Oak in Whitsett, are part of a national trend toward microbreweries that are elevating what was once considered a lowly beverage into an artform. Suds connoisseurs are much more likely to find fish stew and lamb with coconut chutney than wings and pizza during beer dinners at places like Foothills and M'Coul's Public House.

"A big culinary shift and a big shift in people's awareness about food has happened over the past 10 or 20 years," said Samuel Merritt, founder of the Pine Island, N.Y.-based consulting company Civilization of Beer. "And just as cooking is an art, brewing is an art."

The Rise Of Craft Beer

In the early part of the 20th century, most mid- to large-sized cities in America had their own breweries. But Prohibition killed off many of the small beer makers, leaving the market wide open for large brewers like Anheuser-Busch, Coors and Miller. Today those three companies, along with a handful of mid-sized brewers like Pabst, dominate the national beer business.

Aficionados say there is nothing necessarily wrong with the beers made by those companies, which serve well to satiate your thirst. But microbreweries, they say, bring more character to their products.

"These are the standards that the big breweries should be held to," said Ray McCoy of Clemmons, who was sipping a few beers at Foothills.

In the 1970s, New Albion Brewing Co. in Sonoma, Calif., helped jump start a new appreciation for craft brewing in the United States and blazed a trail that would give rise to the likes of Sierra Nevada, Dogfish Head and Samuel Adams. According to the Boulder, Colo.-based Brewers Association, there are now about 1,400 craft brewers in the United States, and their yield last year totaled about 8 million barrels.

In the Piedmont region, Red Oak Brewery, originally known as Spring Garden Brewery, was among the first to offer locally made beers. Owner Bill Sherrill started the business in 1990 after traveling extensively through Europe, where some small breweries have been in operation for centuries. Red Oak brews according to the German Purity Law of 1516, which dictates the uses of hops, water, malted barley, yeast and nothing else. The beer is also unfiltered, which gives it a richer flavor.

"A lot of big breweries use rice and corn, which are cheaper grains, and I guess that's how they get their budget for Super Bowl ads," said brewmaster Chris Buckley. "And they also use preservatives and lots of additives to get shelf life. And that's one reason people are getting more of an appreciation for local beer, because there's nothing like fresh beer. You can't beat it."

Sebastian Wolfrum, brewmaster at Natty Greene's, agrees that freshness is a major driving force for locally made suds.

"It helps with that whole movement of grow local, eat local," he said. "In terms of freshness, most of the beers we serve are not older than two weeks."

A Complex Beverage

Beers in the Piedmont region range in style from white wheat ales to coffee-colored porters and boast such colorful names as Rockets Red Ale (from Liberty Steakhouse), Buckshot Amber Ale (from Natty Greene's) and Sexual Chocolate (from Foothills). They include ingredients such as cocoa nibs and blackberry puree, as well as heavy doses of hops. Nationally, craft brewers may employ everything from pizza sauce to pomegranate juice.

"American brewers have a distinctively different approach," said Marnie Old, director of wine studies at the French Culinary Institute in New York, in a telephone interview. "They may start from European recipes, but they have brought quite a bit of innovation to the process. There's no centuries of tradition here to uphold, so what we see is quite a bit more creative freedom."

At Liberty Steakhouse, brewmaster Todd Isbell has experimented with an espresso beer (made with coffee beans) as well as an oatmeal stout aged on oak chips to create a bourbon-like flavor. Beer and wine, he said, are comparable in their potential for complexity.

"Beer is just as ancient as wine," he said. "It's more difficult to make, and it's less forgiving."

Merritt said beer has been looked down upon for many reasons, dating back to when the Normans invaded England and made wine the drink of the nobles. But it also has much to do with the sometimes bawdy way beer has marketed over the past century.

"In beer advertising, instead of talking about the product and how it's made and the ingredients, they talk about how 'If you drink our beer, you'll do well in sports, you'll do better with women, you'll be better looking' and the list goes on," he said in a telephone interview. "But that advertising worked, and it worked very well. I sometimes tell people you'll never see a beer commercial with a couple of college professors sitting in a respectable pub having a political conversation."

Borscht And Beer

Beer's increasing respectability has brought it a higher profile in the culinary world. Gone are the days when beer-food pairings were limited mainly to such pub fare as potato skins, pizza and hamburgers -- though brewpubs have no shortage of such menu items.

The beer dinner at Foothills last month featured Indian cuisine. This month, borscht, beef stroganoff and other Russian dishes are on the menu. At M'Coul's beer dinner last month, the menu featured crostini with goat cheese and candied walnuts, bacon-wrapped scallops in pomegranate molasses and a cheese plate.

"I think society in general has turned to more premium-style products," said Steven Cardello, the self-styled village elder who organized the beer dinner at M'Coul's. "As Americans' palates become more refined, they want to search for more beers that are fuller with flavor -- and food to go with them. On the menu for the dinner, we kept a little bit of space so people can take their own notes."

"Like with wine, people are getting more sophisticated about what they drink and how they drink it," said 53-year-old Dale Tiffany of Greensboro, who attended the beer dinner at M'Coul's. "This area has a pretty decent history of promoting things like this. This is the fourth beer dinner I've been to."

At the dinners and during beer tastings in general, imbibers work their way up from the paler brews, such as lagers which are lighter on the palate and go well with salads, to the darker varieties such as stouts, which are heavier-bodied and provide a nice compliment to dessert.

The suds are usually served in six- to eight-ounce glasses. Since the part of the tongue that detects bitterness is at the back of mouth, beer tasters usually don't spit like wine tasters do. And since some of the beers can be as high as 10 percent in alcohol (about twice the potency of a Budweiser or Miller Lite), tasters have to be careful about how much they consume.

"You get an Imperial Stout, it's like sitting down with a bottle of wine," said Brad Johnston, president and CEO of Tryon Distributing in Charlotte. "You're at 10 percent alcohol, where a lot of wines are at 11. You sit down and you sip it. It's rich. But you couldn't chug it. I could chug wine a lot easier than I could a lot of these beers."

Contact Robert C. Lopez at 691-5091 or robert.lopez@news-record.com