Chef Daniel Bruce is a wine guy. He drew on 13 years as chef of the Boston Wine Festival when he opened Meritage in the Boston Harbor Hotel and organized its menu not by course but around six categories of wine. So why is Bruce, in his elegant dining room with its spectacular harbor view, up to his toque in bottles of beer, choosing brews to go with some specially created dishes?

Because even Bruce acknowledges that matching food with ales and porters is easier, perhaps even more natural, than with pinots and cabs. ''You're much more limited in your wine selections than with beer," he says. ''Beer is much more versatile to begin with. It's more powerful. The flavors are right there on the tongue."

This is an article of faith among brewers. Talk to those who make beer for a living and sooner or later they all bring up the subject of food pairing. To a person, they will say that the much wider variety of flavors to be found in beer -- ginger, caramel, coffee, dried fruit, pepper, citrus, and chocolate, for instance -- makes it easier to find a perfect brew for any dish. To prove to the unconverted that beer and fine food can be a perfect couple, Bruce agreed to lend his open mind and expert palate to a tasting of 16 bottles, three to five with each of four dishes he created.

A few foods, such as asparagus, defy pairing with wine but go beautifully with malt beverages. And some pairings of food and beer are classics, such as oysters and dry stout. But when he responded to our request to design beer-friendly dishes, Bruce avoided the obvious and came up with creations that could of course be eaten alongside wine but could, it turned out, be even better with the right beer.

On the menu were pan-roasted striped bass with corn, leek, and orange-ale sauce; wild mushroom, apple, and smoked pecan salad; malted-mole-rubbed hanger steak with grilled fennel, tomato, and potato ragout; and pecan porter pie with caramel nutmeg cream.

There are no hard and fast rules in this match game, just guidelines -- and a lot of tasting required. (It's an onerous job, we know.) For suggestions about what to serve with Bruce's food, we did what any home cook can do: We went to three stores with extensive beer selections and asked for help from the stores' beer guys: Andrew Merrick at Charles Street Liquors on Beacon Hill; Alan O'Campbell at Downtown Wine and Liquors in Davis Square, Somerville; and Tim Bush at Colonial Spirits in Acton.

One school of thought about pairing employs the three Cs: The beer should cut, complement, or contrast with the food, explains Jim Koch, founder of Boston Beer Company, maker of Sam Adams.

To cut a dish with a heavy cream sauce, such as a stroganoff or an Alfredo, pair it with a pale ale. The dry, spicy, slightly bitter beer will cut the creaminess of the sauce.

To complement a food, a brew ''should have the same flavors or be in the same flavor family," Koch says. A cream stout with cappuccino flavors would complement a rich chocolate cake, for instance.

A light lager makes a nice contrast to a spicy dish, Koch says. ''The beer's maltiness contrasts with the spicy, fiery flavor of the food."

O'Campbell, store manager at Downtown Wine, has a more lyrical strategy. He thinks about flavors that will be subtle together or will come together to force the taster to say ''Wow."

''It's like being a woman with beautiful hands," O'Campbell explains. ''Do you wear elbow-length white gloves, or do you go with a single strand of pearls around the wrist?"

When Bruce first started pairing wine and food many years ago, he began with the wine. ''My philosophy was that the bottle isn't going to change much between today and a month later," he says. ''So if I taste those flavors, it's easy as a chef to design something to go with them."

Now, he has pulled off so many pairings that he often works the other way. ''I can taste a dish and then think, 'Oh, a young chardonnay without too much oak would work well.' Or I can tell customers, instead of looking for this exact bottle, look for a pinot noir from this area with this much fruit, or go to your wine store and ask."

That's how he thinks beer and food matching should happen: with the food first. He tastes for a direct match, such as the caramel undertones of a J.W. Lees Harvest Ale echoing the caramel in his pecan porter tart. Or he decides whether the ''nice, soft acidity, almost floral" qualities of a Japanese white ale match the striped bass and its orange-ale sauce. Matching can be taken too literally, though: An Avery White Rascal, made with mandarin peel, would seem a natural for the bass dish, but when we tasted them together, the orange flavors became too one-dimensional.

Then there's contrast, which we didn't manage to make work in any of the pairings with Bruce's food. A gueuze, a sour Belgian ale, was a bust as a contrasting flavor to the sweetness of the pecan pie. Perhaps the easiest way to think about the match, though, is through balance: The weight of the beer, the effect on your palate, can either match the weight of the dish or can offset it. ''All in all," Bruce says, ''I'd say balance is what I really go for."

Bruce made his dishes particularly beer-friendly by using beer in the sauces, dressings, and even the pie filling. That's also a common feature of the dishes at the Publick House in Brookline, which takes a similar approach to beer that Meritage does to wine. At the Publick House, which has 24 beers on draft and 150 in bottles, flank steak gets a Mojo IPA marinade, littleneck clams are steamed in an Allagash White Ale broth, and the menu lists suggestions for beer alongside every entree.

It's a strategy that Todd and Jason Alstrom, locals who run the popular website BeerAdvocate.com, wish more upscale restaurants would adopt. In a recent rant they posted slamming Todd English's endorsement of Anheuser-Busch's new ''The Gourmet Lager" (which they call ''the Wonder Bread of beer"), they press restaurants to pay as much attention to their beer lists as they do their food, service, and wine and liquor offerings.

''The last time I went to an upscale [restaurant], my wife and I dropped over $200 on food," Todd Alstrom says in an e-mail conversation. ''She had some great wine, but I was limited to a very boring selection of beers. I thought, why would I want to spend all of this money on excellent food only to pair it with a Stella or Guinness in a can?"

Alstrom thinks the situation is improving. He and his brother are hearing from more and more restaurateurs who want to expand their beer selections.

As for Bruce, who was familiar with two of the 16 beers we tasted, he says this experiment in beer and food matching has ''certainly put some ideas in my head. Am I ready to realize them? Not quite yet. It's not the thrust of what I'm doing at Meritage, but I think there's an opportunity there."

Meritage, after all, is a wine restaurant; its own 11-beer list includes some high-quality but mainstream companies such as Sam Adams, Sierra Nevada, and Stella Artois, popular regional craft breweries Magic Hat and Harpoon, and the commercial brews Bud Light and Coors Light. Bruce says he has to think about what everyday hotel guests might want, as well as what people expecting a wine focus would order. Nonetheless, just as it has become easier to sell obscure wines as the public's appetite for them has grown, ''perhaps the same thing could happen with beer."

''My eyes are opened more than they were before, that's for sure," he says.

Ann Cortissoz can be reached at a_cortissoz@globe.com. Joe Yonan can be reached at yonan@globe.com.

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