Beer may be well loved in this city, but it sure isn't very well respected. Witness the starred restaurant Flambée, which has a wine list spanning 100 years and four continents, including some of the greatest bottles of Bordeaux, Burgundy and Napa Valley. But try to order an aged Belgian ale, strong English barley wine or even a good Czech draft lager with your meal and guess what you're likely to hear:

"We only have one beer. In bottles."

Not even a single keg on draft, and that's right here in pivoville, to say nothing of the entire spectrum of bottled brews available. It's ironic: While the rest of the world is rediscovering the joys of fresh, locally produced foods and drinks, such willful ignorance means missing out on the freshest, most local and often the very best beverage on the market.

But haute cuisine's oenological chauvinism may be forced to change, at least if Garrett Oliver has anything to do with it. In town recently on a brief tasting tour, the author of The Brewmaster's Table raved about the culinary importance of fresh ales and lagers.

"It's becoming impossible for the culinary establishment to ignore beer," Oliver says. "If you go into a culinary academy or a restaurant and match the beers to every course, people are astounded at how well the tastes go together."

The brewmaster at America's Brooklyn Brewery, Oliver has been doing just that, performing beer tastings in restaurants and cooking schools, showing people ignorant of la cusine a la biere just how well brews can combine with food. Working with such renowned chefs as Mario Batali, Oliver has written a book — subtitled Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer With Real Food — that shows off classic and unconventional food-beer combinations.

Given the prevalent viticultural bias, spreading the word about beer's culinary advantages is a hard row to hoe. Nonetheless, in many cases beer can exceed wine, especially in pairings with wine-averse chocolate and other desserts. Even the classic combination of a steak with red wine, Oliver says, lacks something compared to steak with the right ale or lager.

"If a steak is properly done, the outside is well-cooked, kind of caramelized," he says. "With a good wine, there's usually nothing in the wine with that same taste of caramelized sugar."

But many dark beers, he points out, are made with caramelized malt, a related flavor. Other tastes are similarly harmonious, though often outside the knowledge of even the best-trained sommeliers.

"If you have a nice pork dish and a cerné pivo, most people know how well those tastes go together," Oliver says. "But if you have an omelette, most people never think about how nice a German wheat beer is with egg dishes."

It's all about education, he says, and claims that he has beaten many sommeliers in contests to find the best pairing for a given recipe.

Touting the importance of the Slow Food movement, he warns against the workings of giant multinational corporations in the brewing industry, especially here in the land with the greatest beer consumption per capita.

"You have economic forces that are not going to be resistable," he says. "For example, Heineken owns Starobrno. Now Heineken also owns Paulaner. Are you going to tell me that Heineken is not going to insist that Paulaner Hefeweizen is available wherever their beer is sold?"

There are signs that the culture is changing. A recent issue of a leading German wine magazine featured a lone food-beer pairing, with the sommelier who made the choice commenting that sometimes the best wine for the job is a beer. And this summer, two of the leading newspapers in the United States, The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, ran articles in their tony food sections on pairing beer with food.

But all that is a long way from Prague. Like Flambée, most high-end restaurants here have only a single token beer on the list, usually one from a major brewer. And despite the country's love of beer, there is no Czech translation of The Brewmaster's Table yet available.

Oliver, however, seems undeterred. Almost no one here can buy his book, almost no one can read it and yet he keeps talking, pushing for his beverage of choice to get the respect it deserves.