8. ale

8. All beers can be classified as ALEs or lagers. Ales use ale yeast, a top-fermenting yeast suited to warmer temperatures. Ales tend to have a fuller body.

A lager is a beer that uses lager yeast, a bottom-fermenting yeast suited to cooler temperatures. Modern lagers are fermented in refrigerated rooms, but in earlier times, beer was fermented in caves. Lagers tend to have a crisper/cleaner taste.

A stout is an ale and is not easily distinguishable from a porter. Some barkeeps use the terms without much distinction. Both beers are dark due to the dark roasting of the grains. The primary distinction between the two beers centers on porters using just roasted malt and stouts using roasted malt and roasted barley.

A cream stout is a stout that has had lactose added to it for sweetness. Adding other sweeteners like sugar or honey the yeast would simply convert that into alcohol. Yeast cannot convert lactose into alcohol, so the sweetness remains.

Stouts and porters are often served in pint glasses, with either a smooth or a bulbous design.

The brewer Samuel Adams has designed a modern pint glass with the help of Tiax. The new glass features laser etchings in the bottom to stimulate bubbles and continuously deliver carbonation to the beer, a rounded middle to capture the beer’s aromas, and a bead around the inside of the lip to agitate the beer as it is drunk.

A pilsner is a light stout. Most light American beers are pilsners. They gained popularity because they were light enough to be enjoyed after a long hot day at work, offering an alternative drinking a heavy beer. Pilsner glasses, which are thin and conical often hold less than a pint of beer and are designed to spotlight the color of the beer and create and maintain a lasting head.

An IPA (India Pale Ale) is an ale created by the British. Regular beer would spoil on the six-month trip to India, so brewers created a beer with more alcohol and more hops, each of which helped to preserve the beer on the long hot journey.

Steam beer is a beer that uses lager yeast, but at warmer temperatures. Old San Francisco brewers lacked refrigeration and caves so they were forced to make their lagers in warm temperatures, resulting in steam beer. Anchor Steam beer has been brewed in San Francisco since 1896.

A wheat beer uses wheat malt.

A mead isn't a beer, but is one of the earliest alcoholic beverages. A mead is basically water, yeast, honey, and maybe some fruit juice. It is not cooked, but rather left to sit and ferment.

The phrase “cakes and ale” describes that which can be afforded by the good life. It appears in the Shakespeare play Twelfth Night. “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” A translation of the moral to Aesop’s fable The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse is “Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear.”

W. Somerset Maugham titled a 1930 novel Cakes and Ale; or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard. Some charged that the story's unflattering characters were based on contemporaries such as novelist Thomas Hardy, but Maugham denied the connection. The work is regarded as a roman à clef, a thinly disguised fictionalization of real life.