WHEN beer was all about downing macho pints of the industrial stuff, I was only too happy to hang out with the wine drinkers, but since it has come over all micro-brewed and craft, and adopted a language previously associated with serious oenophiles, it has increasingly piqued my interest.

For years I studiously ignored the emerging beer gourmet constituency, people touting trappist ales for chocolate puddings and so on, nursing my blanket antipathy to this gaseous liquid in combination with food. (Too heavy on the stomach). Perhaps I have been worn down by the increasingly credible arguments that beer, in some circumstances, and in moderate quantities, makes a good partner for food, and could in some contexts be (whisper it) a better choice. Or maybe I have simply had enough of drinking terrible wine by the glass. It’s a sucker’s game, condemning you to at best a deeply average wine with a huge mark-up, and there’s barely a casual catering establishment in the land that uses a credible wine preservation system. In more upmarket places, your sommelier is hopefully keeping a careful eye on how long bottles have been opened. But few bartenders are on the case. Fewer still would recognise an oxidised wine if the odour slapped them in the face like a dank, damp kitchen cloth.

At the new Innis & Gunn Beer Kitchen in Edinburgh, my rum-finished ale is super Styrian, matured over Demerara Jamaican rum-infused heartwood “in our oakerators”. It smells of raisins and warm mulled spice, yet the taste is “surprisingly light”. I know all this because it says so on the accompanying beermat. And I’m not arguing. At 6.8% it’s lower alcohol than most wine, a bonus in these tightened drink drive limit, health-conscious days, but the key thing is that it’s a lovely drink. Choosing which beer to have from the poetic selection is a diverting puzzler made easier because the staff bring you not so “small” free tasters to help you decide. Keenly priced beer flights are ideal for the perpetually indecisive.

I’m lapping up this beery sweet talk, so much so that my critical faculties are dulled on the food front. The tag “contemporary cookhouse” sounds wise (nothing too cheffy; keep the beer centre stage; manage expectations downwards), so all I’m expecting is food that makes a placid, non-combative partner for the liquid offering. Actually, to be honest, I’m looking for a little more than that, something that’s a bit better than just okay. Starters fitted the bill. Homemade Scotch egg, a ball of cleanly fried, breadcrumbed porky sausage meat cosseted an ochre-yolked free-range egg cooked to velvety, oozing perfection. For the moment, I’m ignoring the left-the-market-too-long-ago watercress, and the fact that Innis & Gunn’s “original brewn sauce”, stops all other flavours dead in their tracks. As the unapologetically piquant sweet chilli jam that flanks rosemary and sage-roasted cauliflower croquettes with cheesy strings of Isle of Mull cheddar shows, relishes are big personalities in these here parts.

Main courses thud onto the table. Flat iron steak (bearing no traces of its promised olive oil, garlic and rosemary marinade, with a tarragon-challenged Béarnaise) and an ungainly tranche of slow-braised brisket, where the thick, brown rum finish beer sauce just can’t overcome the molar-testing dryness of the lean meat. And by this point, the keeling over watercress is really beginning to bug me; it sits on each plate like a leitmotif for a kitchen that hasn’t quite got its supplies ordering right. And would the chef eat the “pickled cucumber and fennel slaw” that is a saggy, dressing-free heap of grated carrot with khaki specks?

Working our way through our beer flights, the long wait for one of the few desserts that haven’t run out is surprisingly bearable, as is the baked vanilla and crowdie cheesecake, although, is it just me, or does it have a faint whiff of garlic about it? I’m feeling the “Beer” bit of the name, but the “Kitchen”? Let me get back to you on that.

Innis & Gunn Beer Kitchen, 81-83 Lothian Road, Edinburgh 0131 228 6392

Lunch/Dinner £10-30

Food rating 6/10