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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mal Malenkirk" data-source="post: 5389990" data-attributes="member: 834">Ah, a chance to be an insufferable know-it-all, hurray!  Friendly warning; Ignore this post if you don’t care about beer.Most of the dark beers are ale, dimsdale, though color has nothing to do with a beer being an ale or not.  And in fact, the bitterest beers are frequently both ale and pale!  What makes an ale as opposed to a lager is the temperature at which the fermentation occurs; low temperature for lagers and room temperature for ales.  This affects what kind of yeast is used and how it behaves.  Lager’s fermentation tends to be more thorough and leave a smoother taste with little aromatic sediments.  Ales tend to have a stronger taste because there are more residues.  It’s more complex than that but even I can’t get into the technicality of how yeast breaks down sugars in different condition.  As a gross generalization, lagers make the bulk of the mass market beers (Bud, Coors etc. are all lagers) while ale are favored by aficionados (read; beer snobs like me <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ).  It’s a bit unfair though, because quality lagers certainly exist and Germany is the king in that field.   What determines the color of a beer is the temperature used when the malt is dried (before we get to the fermentation).  If you let it dry on its own you'll get the common gold color.  If you heat or smoke it you'll get the deeper shades from caramel colored to pitch black.  Roasted Malt can give flavors of coffee or chocolate to beer.  But it has little to do with bitterness.  Bitterness of the beer is principally caused by hops; what kind was used, how fresh, what quantity, with what kind of water (mineral content has big impact) etc.  And bitterness is not an ugly word.  You get used to it just like you get used to it in coffee.  In my case, I used to put 2 milk and three sugars in my coffee by habit while in parallel developing a taste for some bitter beer (India Pale Ale, mostly).  Then one day I suddenly realized by accident I preferred my coffee black!In conclusion, good beer is like wine.  It’s an acquired taste.  The good news is that unlike wine, quality beer usually isn’t that much more expansive than the commercial fare, especially if you discover the local micro-brewery.</blockquote>

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