Fermented malt beverage Ale

There are two major types of beer, namely Ales and lagers. Ales have been brewed for thousands of years, using specific warm-brew Ale yeasts, that float at the top of the brew.

Ales tend to have a fruity flavor profile with a sweeter taste and a fuller-body. They also tend to be darker and have a cloudier appearance. They have a higher alcohol content, more robust flavor, more bitterness, and a stronger hop flavor.

The word ale is derived from the medieval hael, meaning "good health." Ale: Beers made with yeast that floats (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) to the top of the brewing vats, -resulting in a cloudier beer. This type of yeast is a top-fermenting ale yeast, and most likely the yeast that brewers were inadvertently brewing with over 3,000 years ago.

The top fermenting yeast will float to the beer surface for the initial couple of days and then settles at the base, while Lagers make use of bottom fermenting yeast which settles without necessarily floating to the surface.

Ale yeast also tends to ferment best at hotter temperatures, with most preferring temperatures between 50°F and 70°F—with some saison yeasts getting up into the nineties at the peak of fermentation. Saison yeast produces fruity esters reminiscent of lemon and orange citrus notes.

Ale yeasts are responsible for a huge range of beer styles like witbiers, stouts, ambers, tripels, saisons, IPAs, and so many more.
Fermented malt beverage Ale

History of Ale

History of Ale
Ale as it is known today, evolved into its present form from ancient beginnings. There is evidence that ale was first a form of low-alcohol mead.

The Anglo-Saxon word ealu and the Norse word ol, are early forms of the word “ale”, but they are related to the ancient Germanic world alu.

Alu however, refers to mead. How then did an ancient drink made from honey end up as a beverage made from malt & hops?

Ancient honey production was very crude when compared to modern bee keeping.

The gathering of the honey often involved the destruction of the hive, either buy the outright killing of the bees, or by a failure to leave sufficient honey within the hive to sustain it through the autumn and winter.

As the population of Northern Europe increased the honey production it seems could not keep pace. More water was probably added to mead to stretch the supply, thus lowering its alcohol content and eventually changing the character of the drink.

A distinction might then have been made between the stronger and more difficult to make “mead” and the less potent but more plentiful “ale”.

Eventually, this thinning of the mead into ale probably went as far as possible, and something had to augment the ingredient in the beverage.

The brewers would have been forced to use what was at hand, and that was the local grain, possible after it had been made into bread. So, first oats and then barley were used.
History of Ale