At first glance, Christina Perozzi and Hallie Beaune, who are known around town as "the beer chicks," couldn't be more different: Perozzi is a busty, olive-skinned brunette, while Hallie is bean-pole thin, has a creamy complexion and light blonde hair. Although the two appear to be complete opposites, they each have a serious passion for beer that could only be rivaled by one another.

That passion brought them together to write The Naked Pint, a book they describe as a layman's introduction to the complexities of beer.  Perozzi and Beaune have also hosted a series of beer-paired dinners at Rustic Canyon, in Santa Monica, for the past three years.

The most recent dinner, billed as a "Spring Beer Bash," happened last week. It comprised five beer-paired courses that featured not only Chef Evan Funke's local and seasonal cooking, but also beers from local breweries.

These dinners started in fall 2007 as beer-paired meals began popping up across the country. Perozzi and Beaune noticed the trend and wanted to do the same thing in Los Angeles. They approached Rustic Canyon because they wanted a space that was high-end with great food but casual enough to relax.

"Chef Funke is so innovative and the whole local and seasonal approach was really a new way of dining at the time," said Perozzi. "We wanted to expand that and we saw that people were drinking beer in a new way at the same time, too."

"We were really excited about great beer and bringing it to a new clientele," added Beaune. "That the food was seasonal and beer is really seasonal, too, just brought everything together."

Perozzi and Beaune insist that beer pairs just as well with food as wine does, but with a better price point.

"You can spend a lot less for a great bottle of Belgian beer than you can for, say, a bottle of Burgundy," said Perozzi.

For the dinner last week, Perozzi and Beaune looked to local breweries Craftsman, Skyscraper Brewing Company, and the Bruery for their picks. They paced the dinner so the beer got progressively darker throughout the meal, starting with a white unfiltered Belgian-style wheat beer and ending with a strong American-style caramel-colored ale.

At the dinner, the variety of diners was intriguing - groups of women occupied more than half the tables and couples of a wide age-range occupied the rest.

"Ten years ago, the beer scene was made up of beer geeks, college kids, and 65-year-old men," said Beaune. "Now you see more women and more professional people drinking beer and taking it seriously."

"People are also starting to drink with an understanding of quality over quantity," chimed Perozzi. "Some great chefs have started introducing wonderful beer lists and using beer as an ingredient in their cooking."

Perozzi and Beaune met at Father's Office, one of the first bars in the city to take its beer list seriously and introduce Angelenos to the pleasures of craft beer when it was revamped by current chef/owner Sang Yoon in 2000. They both worked their way up from barbacks to managers, participating in the bar's rigorous training during which they both learned everything there was to learn about beer.

They both eventually got tired of answering the same questions from the bar's patrons night after night.

"People would come in and ask us, 'What is your lightest beer?' because they didn't like the mass-produced beer they were familiar with," said Perozzi.

"Or they'd say 'I want an ale' or 'I want a lager' but they had no idea what that meant," said Beaune. "It's like saying, 'I'll have a red wine' or 'I'll have a white wine'."

Perozzi and Beaune decided to take things into their own hands and write a book that provided readers with an accessible introduction to the world of beer. At the time they set out to write their book, most books about beer were either text books for were written for people that were already beer aficionados.

"It was fun to write - it involved a lot of drinking!" said Beaune.

"It was interesting because we had to learn the history of beer and all the ways of making it and we had to learn how to describe flavor notes in a way that people could grasp," said Perozzi.

Perozzi and Beaune are both very excited about the prospects for beer in Los Angeles.           

"It's such a huge city, there has to be room for more microbreweries to pop up!" said Beaune.

"Now that the idea of the gastropub has taken hold, I think that the whole trend of serious beer drinking will definitely stay," said Perozzi.

When asked about their favorite beers of the moment, Perozzi admitted a fondness for saisons, low-alcohol pale ales brewed seasonally with flavors that she described as spicy, peppery, dry, and citrusy. Beaune said she's been keen on Belgian-style beers, and especially one called Orval, brewed by trappist monks - a fact she said gives it a coolness factor - that has a flavor profile that is earthy, grassy, funky, and dry.

For now, beer chicks Perozzi and Beaune will continue to nurse their passion for great beer and educate anyone in their path about the complexities of beer.