Why the distinction between Beer and Ale?

In Bavaria, you don't stick to the bench... the bench sticks to you.

 

Three posts later I said "in England over the centuries," but it's all good Tut. It's all beer on the bench at this point.
Cheers!

 

Ahhh....brewing history.
More and more it just seems like we love over-categorizing beers at the expense of history and logic.

 

History has little to nothing to do with modern meanings of words. Which is something marquis will never understand. Also, US English and UK English arent the same language, even if we do mostly understand each other.

 

This is the way I've always understood it based on a scientific approach of splitting beer into the two different types of fermentation and futher delineating subcategories of each based on ingredients/color/flavor/marketing/arbitrary BS.

The old way is not always the best way.

 

Have we mentioned Texas yet?

 

Surely you must be joking?

 

How about the brewery Pretty Things Beer and Ale Project? That name never made much sense to me.

 

If you are referring to the old arbitrary TX label approval laws, I believe that BS is over.

 

Yeah, they couldn't have been less specific...
"Ale - tastes like ale" and "Beer - tastes like beer"

 

Well they have brewed both Beer and Ale: KK and X Ale were Ales, East India Porter a Beer.

 

Well, if your name is Coffey it's probably because your paternal ancestors were as well.It's er to do with history. We learn from the past to understand the present.

 

It's not really scientific though.Where the yeast collects doesn't really matter. It's that lagers are fermented and stored cold whereas ales and porters are made under warmer conditions.So called bottom fermenting yeasts work best at low temperatures and top fermenting ones at higher ones.But with modern technology it would be possible to develop a warm fermenting bottom acting yeast , in fact I believe this is being worked on as it would be useful to have one in a conical fermenter when brewing ales and porters.
The system breaks down anyway when some German beers are involved.There is a class known as obergärige lagerbiers or literally "top fermented lagers"
Placing beer into two camps, ale and lager is effectively saying that the Germans have got German beer wrong and the British have got British beers wrong.

 

Yes, trying to tailor a definition to fit all cultures and semantic regimens is frustrating, obscurative, and a waste of time in general. Understanding regional and historical roots of anything is a worthwhile exercise. To insist upon them in a current context is not.

I also agree with everything not quoted from your post.

 

A joke?? Really? I guess he didn't catch that gleam in your eye or the smile in your voice when you said it,...

 

Well, they (thescAH) had a long history of sabotage. The got to F. W. Salem, who stated in his 1880 Beer: Its History And Its Economic Value as a National Beverage:

And, then, after the Pure Food hearings in the early 1900s, Congress appointed The Committee on Food Standards, Assoc. of Official Agricultural Chemists to come up with legal definitions of what were at the time called "malt liquors" they came up with:


It does appear that there was some sort of, well, let's call it an "American Revolution" sometime in the late 18th century, and even the so-called "Ale and Porter" brewers of the US (many of whom did originally emigrate from Great Britain) went their own way and the US brewing industry and its terminology evolved differently from that of the Mother country.
(Oh, yeah, and then the Germans started arriving and bringing their bottom fermenting lager yeast and, well, things changed even more...).

 

The problem with much that's written regarding our tipple is that it's often written by those who aren't, or don't make themselves, fully informed.
This continues to this day; I bow to the knowledge and skills of a brewer regarding the transformation of malt and hops into beer but that doesn't mean they have much idea about for example beer styles or background.And many well known beer writers don't do a particularly professional job regarding these aspects.
Politicians write definitions, they aren't experts on the subject.But often they think they are.