Hello, have a quick question for everybody! Is wheat beer an ale or a larger? Ive been looking but I've struggled to find a conclusive answer. Thankyou!
Hefe = ale http://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/style/89/ conclusive answer humm, well welcome to the world of it depends on when in time your ask and who defines it. lager yeast and ale yeast used to define things, but crazy brewers love to mix things up. then top ferm versus bottom etc. the crazy question is who decides its an ale or lager.? or a beer? is it all beer? works for me.
the crazy question is who decides its an ale or lager.? or a beer? is it all beer? works for me.[/QUOTE] Thats very true! Thanks for clearing that up!
Remember, all ales are beer, but not all beer is ale... (at least by our current definitions of the terms) For the purposes of your (possibly rhetorical) question, it's the brewer who decides if it's an ale or lager, by which yeast he pitches to ferment. I suppose most hefeweizen yeasts are ale yeasts, but there are plenty of wheat lagers out there. to answer the OP, is it can be either an ale or a lager.
American Pale/Dark Wheat Ale, Witbier, Wheatwine, Gose, Berliner Weissbier, Kristalweizen, Hefeweizen, Dunkelweizen, Weizenbock = ALES
humm I vote for ale, and yea beer ale is a funny thing depends on WHEN you ask. AKA history.... and who you ask... I stoped fighting about it and session beer long ago, life is too short. I go with Amber, Gold and Black book definitions myself.
If by "ale" you mean a top fermented beer then the vast majority of wheat beers on the market would fall into that category. That does not mean a wheat beer could not be lagered or brewed with bottom fermenting yeast.
@azorie wins! Sierra Nevada Kellerweis' new label says "Bavarian-Style Wheat", instead of "Hefeweizen".
The word "ale" is distressingly badly used. To use it as a synonym for top fermented beer is both historically inaccurate and misleading.The Germans don't call their top fermented beers ales , just "obergärige" as they consider ales to be a family of beers of English origin. The type of yeast is somewhat misleading. With the advent of conical fermenters all brewers using them collect the yeast from the bottom.It's more a matter of matching the yeast to the fermentation temperatures. Brewing yeasts are traditionally classed as "top-cropping" (or "top-fermenting") and "bottom-cropping" (or "bottom-fermenting") Yeast were termed top or bottom cropping, because in traditional brewing yeast was collected from the top or bottom of the fermenting wort to be reused for the next brew.This terminology is somewhat inappropriate in the modern era; after the widespread application of brewing mycology it was discovered that the two separate collecting methods involved two different yeast species that favoured different temperature regimes, namely Saccharomyces cerevisiae in top-cropping at warmer temperatures and Saccharomyces pastorianus in bottom-cropping at cooler temperatures.As brewing methods changed in the 20th century, cylindro-conical fermenting vessels became the norm and the collection of yeast for both Saccharomyces species is done from the bottom of the fermenter, thus the method of collection no longer implies a species association. There are a few remaining breweries who collect yeast in the top-cropping method, such as Samuel Smiths brewery in Yorkshire, Marstons in Staffordshire and several German hefeweizen producers.
So what do we call it? should we just combine the terms, and lager just means stored? but ales can be lagered so?
