Whats the difference between beer and ale?
A. (by Mike Cheater, with minor editing by Vicki Rosenzweig): Ale is a drink that can be traced back to prehistoric times from Sumeria and is brewed from malted barley, yeast and water to produce an alcoholic beverage. Beer was introduced to Britain in the 15th century by brewers from Germany and Flanders. Essentially beer is ale with the addition of hops, a flowering plant, which adds to the bitterness of the product but more importantly enables it to keep longer. Malt, hops, yeast and liquor (water) were the traditional ingredients for beer until the 1950s (and in Germany are still the only permitted ingredients [I think EU regulations have overridden this, but “brewed according to the German beer purity laws” sells beer, even outside Germany.–VR]). In the late 1950s and early 1960s British brewers, amongst others, discovered that the quality of beer was dependent on the skills of the cellar man of the pub who sold them. To produce a more standard product practices like pasteurisati
