A glass of pale ale
1 February 2023
In Present-Day usage, beer is more commonly used than ale, and for many beer is a more general category of which ale is a subset. But there are those who distinguish between the two. The distinction between the two, however, has changed over the centuries.
Both words trace back to Old English. In Old English, ealu (ale) was by far more common than beor (beer). Ealu appears some 225 times in the extant corpus, while beer appears only about 60 times. Ealu usually referred to what today we would recognize as ale or beer, and it was also used to gloss the Latin cervisia and caelia, but it could be used more generally to mean any intoxicating drink, including wine. Beor, on the other hand, was used to refer to a sweeter brewed beverage, made with fruits or honey. This passage about John the Baptist from one of Ælfric of Eynsham’s late tenth-century sermons makes use of both terms:
Iohannes ða ða he gestiðod wæs ða wolde he forbugan ða unðeawas þe men begað. and ferde ða to westene. and ðaær wonode oð þæt he fullweaxen wæs. and ðær swiðe stiðlice leofode. ne dranc he naðor ne win. ne beor. ne ealu. ne nan ðæra wætena ðe men of druncniað
(John, when he had grown strong, then he would abstain from vices that men practice, and then went into the wilderness and dwelled there until he was full grown, and lived there very abstemiously, he drank neither wine, nor beer, nor ale, nor any of those liquors that men drink of.)
Beer remained the rarer word until the sixteenth century, when hops began to be widely used in the brewing industry, and it became the term for a brew made with hops. Ale remained, for a time, a hop-less beverage.
But that too changed, and eventually ale began to be brewed with hops, and that distinction between the two words was lost. Instead, ale began to refer to a brew fermented at a higher temperature and where the yeast gathered at the top of the cask, whereas beer was brewed at a lower temperature and the yeast would fall to the bottom. And today, ales tend to be hoppier than beers. Those are the technical distinctions that most brewers observe today, although there is considerable overlap between the two in common usage, and relatively few consumers of the beverages are aware of the technical distinctions.
Sources:
Ælfric. “#3. “VIII. Idus. Ianuarii. Sermo in Aepiphania Domini.” In Malcolm Godden, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The Second Series Text. Early English Text Society, SS 5. London: Oxford UP, 1979, 19.
Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. ealu, n., beor, n.
Godden, Malcolm. Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: Introduction, Commentary, and Glossary. Early English Text Society, SS 18. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000, 364.
Google Books Ngram Viewer, 4 January 2023, s.v. beer, ale.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2012, s.v. ale, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. beer, n.1.
Image credit: Alan Levine, 2016. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.