Ale vs Lager

This label has both "lager" and "ale" very prominently featured. Lager-Öl is literally "lager-ale", where "ale" is noting that it's beer made in the "lager" style, much like Crusader was talking about.

"Ale" is the native Germanic word for beer, while beer is likely a very early borrowing from Latin biber, also in the word imbibe.

Yay English for having three words for fermented barley beverages- beer, ale, and lager.

 

This is fantastic. If you're actually putzing around with this, I can't wait to see some of the results. If you get a strong correlation between your F values and the top 250, I think you may have discovered something.

 

To confuse things further, when they refer to lager they mean the watery, fizzy, BMC type of lager. They don´t generally use the broad meaning like we do. One of my favorite British beer phrases is "lager lout". It describes drunk and often obnoxious men, usually young, who consume large quantities of BMC type beer. I´ve had some frustrating conversations in Britain trying to explain there are excellent lagers available in the USA and Germany.

 

Time to pull in another variable. Time between brewing and canning/bottling. Even amont IPAs there is variability in how long the beer sits before canning.

 

This discussion is always fun. Popcorn and a Jever in order.

I think an understanding of the origins of these designations is important for those involved in preserving the history of brewing and teaching those who brew.

Beyond this argument, I think the classifications/styles over here are just nuts. OK the lager/ale/stout thing is less important in the reality of modern brewing. No Darwinian selection of yeast. However is it a porter, is it an ale? It's so messed up that you never know what they are calling the stuff coming out these days unless you just go with the idea that somehow, about everything wants to be called an IPA.


Any role for what stuff actually tastes like?

 

I have not tried this, but I was curious about the question so I looked in a recipe book to see if perhaps a recipe for a Porter was close to one for a Bock. It is similar for the malts, although the hop varieties were different for the two beers, and the obvious use of different yeasts. (Other Porters and Bock recipes vary quite a bit though.) So you could say that a Porter is a 'beermate' to a Bock, and maybe there are other styles with similar ingredients could be identified. (Stout and a Dopplebock?

I'm going to guess that the same recipe with the different yeasts has been brewed by someone who reads these forums (or perhaps a commercially-brewed pair of beers). We just have not heard from anyone yet.

 

This thread is exactly why I like going into "boutique beer" bars and asking: "Do you have any lagers or ales?"

 

He and all the others that post "I don't like lagers" in a thread on lagers. They forget there are a lot of "boring" ales.

 

how many of them reply "nope, only porters and stouts"?

 

This is the real question.

 

Now I don't homebrew and I am a bit of a rookie here so this may be a dumb question but couldn't you do a pale ale/pilsner and just change the yeast? They seem similar enough. Brewers are using pilsner malt in pales recently.

 

And this is why I preach the gospel of drinking German/Czech beers at the source....

A true German/Czech pilsner should taste nothing like an American Pale Ale...and not just because of a few fruity esters. (p.s. I don't blame you in any way for thinking so, rather I blame U.S. "craft" brewers for trying to pass off what are essentially APAs as German/Czech-style lagers.)

 

Pilsner malt is commonly used in Pale Ales in the UK. The idea is to get less malt emphasis on hop forward beer, such as the so-called Golden Ales. These beers attract lager (macro Eurofizz) drinkers.

The more I look at beer writing the more clear it becomes that most of it is recycled from other articles and little attempt has been made to actually check its accuracy.Myths become accepted as reality. Look at the sheer garbage written about Scottish brewing (example being the Oxford Beer Companion) , IPA and Porter/Stout (eg the myth about roasted barley)
Beer folklore simply gets passed around and repeated.You cannot trust the Internet unless you know where it's come from.
You mention Ron and Martyn. These scholars actually take the trouble to check facts.They examine contemporary records and very often blow the accepted views out of the water.If brewing records for example do not show long boils or low hopping in Scotland then where is the evidence for it and why are they endlessly repeated?

 

The difference stems from Swedish brewing having adopted hops without there being a new word for the hopped beer. In the Swedish law of the land from 1442 it was mandated that each farmstead should have a hop yard and erect 40 poles worth of hops. Part of the hops went to the crown as taxes, which they used to brew beer for the army and navy (and the royal court). There may have been some initial opposition to the use of hops just as there was in England, but I haven't come across any sources which discuss this so I couldn't say anything about that. What is certain is that the word öl survived the introduction of hops and was applied to all beers, whether or not they used hops or some other herb such as myrica gale, and whether or not they were domestically produced or imported.

 

The difficulty in doing this is that lagering a beer for the homebrewer requires the ability to gradually reduce the temperature during fermentation, while ale fermentation can be done at room temperature.
I do homebrew, but I am no expert, this is what I have read many times.

 

Here's another example, this time of a lager beer brewery that starts brewing porter. Bjurholms bryggeri started brewing bottom fermented Bavarian lager beer in 1858 or 1859. In 1865 they built a large new ice cellar. In the summer of 1876 the brewery owner, Anders Bjurholm, travelled to England and when he came back the brewery constructed a new porter fermentation cellar on the brewery grounds (the brewery had produced small amounts of porter prior to his trip to England, but whether this was top fermented or bottom fermented I can't say). This porter became very successful and was a major product for the company. The brewery also started making pale ale.

 

Interesting that hops grow in Sweden when the perceived beer folklore is that they don't grow in Scotland, which has a much more temperate climate. (In fact the Scottish brewing industry lay in Edinburgh and Alloa which have the same climate as Burton)