Controversial Beer Opinions Thread

They are commonly regarded as such in some places. But most pubs in the UK have posters advertising "Ales and Stouts" or "Ales and Porters" because of the two separate brewing industries.Ale and Beer.Porters were the products of the Beer industry.
Unfortunately it seems to have been assumed that Ales are simply top fermented beers and lagers are bottom fermented. So Kolsch which is a top fermented lager causes some confusion.
Baltic Porters have never been regarded as either Ales or Lagers, just Beers.
It always causes problems when people try to apply modern meanings to things from the past.

 

It also causes problems when people insist on archaic and obsolete distinctions that haven't existed for hundreds of years.

There hasn't been any difference between ales and porters for 200 years.

Tell me. If I make a British style beer with Maris Otter, Crystal Malt, Black malt, and some invert sugar with Fuggles and Boddington's yeast... Is it an ale or a Porter?
Do I call it a dark mild ale, brown ale, porter, or stout?

What if there's just enough Black malt to get a brown color without adding much flavor? Then if I add a little more Black malt to get a light toastiness it's still an ale. At what point adding Black malt does it stop being an ale?

Insisting on separating Porter and Ale as two family's of malt beverages just breeds confusion.

 

You do realize porter is an authentic English beverage, yes?

 

Agreed.

 

It's a Porter as it contains black malt. Mild gets its colour(when dark, some Mild are pale such as Timothy Taylors Golden Best) from dark sugar and caramel. This gives a very different flavour profile.
Your 200 years is wildly off. The reason we see brewing ads for "Ales and Stouts" is because with Porter and Stout going out of fashion their breweries started to brew Ales. But they clearly understood the difference because they mentioned them both and distinguished between them. I never heard anybody call Guinness an Ale in all my drinking life.

 

Or perhaps insisting on considering porters types of ales just breeds confusion... and this is proof of that. There's a problem with calling something "ale yeast" and then insisting that anything made with it is an ale. It's silly. Speaking of breeding confusion, "ale yeast" is like taking an Angus cow and changing its name to "burger cow" and taking a Hereford and changing its name to "taco cow." Then someone makes a burger from "taco cow" meat, and reasons that he's actually made a "taco."

@marquis @Amendm

 

Although they are, indeed, two separate and distinct species of yeast, the thing that affects your end product the most is the temperature at which you carry out fermentation when dealing with both of these Saccharomyces species. Therefor it is more nurture than nature, if you would, that determines the characteristics of your beer.

 

The problem lies in calling these "ale yeasts" and "lager yeasts". Because Ales are brewed using a top fermenting yeast does not imply that everything brewed from it is an Ale.
There is a language called English because that is what is spoken in England. This does not mean that everybody who uses that language is English too.

 

Guinness is... Guinness. People were drinking it long before anyone gave a hoot what an "ale" or a "lager" was. Sort of a standalone product, like Band-Aid and bandage.

Oh, and *color

 

Favour, flavour, odour, grey...
I started out British and, after fifty-something years in the States, I still get infuriated when spell-check tries to correct me.

Plaster.

 

I love it when folks discuss styles and naming conventions this way. Not that it ever settles things. It doesn't. It can't. I love it because it just further shows how great the need is to re-do our beer naming and style conventions. I have my own ideas about how to do it, but sometimes, as here, it seems like any other new system would be better than what we have now.

I mean, FFS, I pick wild mushrooms, and we mushroom pickers have our debates about mushroom taxononomy, but it's usually along the lines of micro characteristics versus macro characteristics. Here in the beer world this discussion just gets stupid.

 

There sure are a lot of Brits (and folk living in the Northeast) on this site!

 

I thought I understood: Ales were beers that were top-fermented, lagers were beers that were bottom-fermented. Within those two big tents, were a number of discrete styles which were specific to themselves and if you brew a style from one tent in the other tent then it gets a new name. For example, if you lager an IPA it becomes an IPL. Probably overly simplistic, but I myself have no philosophical objection to adding style names whenever it seems necessary

 

We've got to be somewhere.

 

I've never seen so many folk from Massachusetts together at one place and time (also never been to Massachusetts, or any of those other "exotic" states back east).

 

My Great-Great-Great Uncle Ernest observed, "A plow horse ain't a race horse" to which he added any horse that did it's job well was an admirable animal. In my view the making of ales and the making of lagers are processes subject to infinite variations depending in the skill and intentions of the brewer.

My approach is practical rather than academic, if I like it I'll buy it again.

 

For most of the time this works well.Ales are top fermented, true. But so are Stouts and Porters and this doesn't in itself make them Ales.
Read Martin Cornell's article Zythophile: Look, will you all stop misusing the word "Ale" . Thank you
And lagers are simply beers which have been lagered at low temperature.As yeasts which works best at cold temperatures are bottom fermenting the result is that practically all lagers are bottom fermented and vice versa.
But these are results rather than causes. The Germans with their liking to be logical have their definition of lager based on whether a beer has been lagered or not. So there are things called "Obergariges lagerbier" or "top fermented lager" such as Kolsch.
One other problem is that the overwhelming bulk of beer literature is not properly researched but rather a cut and paste job on other unresearched material. So errors and myths become accepted as fact.

 

You are insanely insane.

 

The trouble is the style naming convention(s) has no common ground for its names. This is how it can be a list of "beer" styles, and in some of the countries where the "convention" is in "use", it is not even clear if all, or only some, of the entries in the list, are actually to be called "beer". So for some entries it is color, others it is origin, others it is yeast type, others it is fementable ingredients, others it is non-fermentable ingredients, or other factors, that is used to determine the "beer's" place in the taxonomy. Worse, some "beers" in some naming conventions are first put into large collections based on temperature of its fermentation regardless of the yeast used, and even this does not have a common understanding for everyone. So you can have a "beer" style that is considered three or more different things due to this, such as Baltic Porter which disregards type of yeast used and mixes together color, geographic origin, and temperature of fermentation. You know, to prevent confusion

So you end up with this mish mosh of naming conventions that have almost no common ground, are often contradictory, and are of almost no service to consumers. In fact, they are best used only by folks who wish to argue their meanings, which is as foolhardy a discussion it is possible to have about "beer".

 

Bottom Line: People tend to forget that an accurate history of the origin of a taxonomy doesn't mean the taxonomy itself is accurate and/or complete.