Beer Q&A: Ales and lagers? What's the difference?

Aug. 9, 2018 11:45 AM PT

Q: “Ales and lagers? What’s the difference?”

A: In the kingdom of beer, there are two large classes: ales and lagers. The former use top-fermenting yeast and require as little as two weeks to make; the latter, bottom-fermenting yeast and require weeks or months to produce.

Lagers tend to be smoother, with narrowly-defined flavors. Examples: pilsner, dunkel, Helles, schwarzbier. Most of the larger industrial beers — Budweiser, Miller, Coors and their light versions — are lagers. Ditto, most German imports.

Ales tend to be fruitier, with flavors that are more vivid and layered. Examples: India pale ale, pale ale, brown ale, barley wine. Craft breweries produce far more ales than lagers, although there are exceptions: Gordon Biersch, for one, focuses on lagers.

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Peter Rowe

Peter is a freelance writer who writes about beer in his bimonthly column Brewery Rowe for the San Diego Union-Tribune. He worked as a reporter and columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune from 1984 to 2020. A native Californian who grew up in Encinitas, Rowe is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Northwestern University. He is past president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and a former Fulbright scholar. He has won a few journalism awards, but would trade them all for a chance to avenge his 1994 “Jeopardy!” loss. Married to a terrific woman who has saved him from errors in writing and in life, he has three sons.