h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Not all beers are brewed from either lager or ale yeast.

There are a few breweries who use wine and champagne yeast for their stronger beers.

Some of the larger breweries in order to jump on the "bottle conditioned real ale" bandwaggon, ferment using a top fermenter, then fine or even filter beers, before krausening the beer using a bottom fermenter, which is more stable in storage.
Still tastes Ok!! though .take care ianmac.

A wine yeast is still a top-fermenting yeast and so the same family as an ale yeast.

There are 3 basic type of beer, based on the type of yeast used:

1. Top-fermenting. Ales.

2. Bottom-fermenting. Lagers.

3. Spontaneously-fermented. Lambics.

The third type does not use a cultured yeast but allows fermentation to take place using wild yeasts that are present in the atmosphere. In the case of lambic beers, these are a strange mixture of yeast strains and bacteria which cause a bizarre multi-stage fermentation that ferments out pretty well 100% of the sugars. The earliest beers made in Mesopotamia and Egypt would have also had this sort of fermentation.


There are also beers fermented with bread yeast. An example is Sahti from Finland. These are also of the top-fermenting family.

It's perfectly possible to have a bottle-conditioned (or even cask-conditioned) lager. That's exactly what the most traditional of lagers, Franconian Kellerbiers, are. How do you think they could manage to get condition into lagers before the introduction of artificial carbonation at the end of the 19th century?

Lambics are top fermenting. Or at least the ones that I've seen are.

But, just because a yeast is top or bottom fermenting doesn't make it a ale or lager yeast. Ale and lager yeasts get killed off at a certain alcohol strength, not sure how strong, somewhere around the 9% mark I think it is, could be 11% though.