Rodbrew70 said:
So I can walk into my local bottle'o and grab a slab of draught or rock into the pub and ask for a schooner of draught! Stubbies/tap beer same brewer same name, some extract homebrews are even advertised the same, as draught! Is there a way of guessing/telling weather it's an ale or lager??
as a side note the brew I grew up drinking was made by a famous Australian brewer which exports a lager and I'm guessing that what I was drinking was a lager.
Haha! There's so many Australianisms in this post I don't think any non-Australians would have a clue what your'e talking about.
Bottle'o, slab, "rock into", schooner, stubbies...
Generally it's pretty easy to tell typical lagers and ales apart. Lagers are usually crisp and dry with little fruitiness or other yeasty flavours. Lager yeasts ferment "cleaner", meaning they produce very few yeast flavours and aromas.
Ale yeasts do, and you'll taste and smell this.
Australian kit beers, as far as I know, probably won't be a lager. I think Coopers kits come with generic ale yeasts that are quite temperature resistant and produce good beer at Australian temps.
At bests it's probably some kind of resistant ale/lager blend designed for maximum versatility.
If you didn't bother cooling your wort during fermentation, you haven't made a lager. If you had a lager yeast and fermented above 15 degrees... you haven't really made a lager - It'll turn out much more like an ale.
If you had an ale yeast and tried to ferment it at 10 degrees, it probably wouldn't have started.
Look at the temperature recommendation for the yeast. If it's something like 18-25 degrees it's an ale yeast and anything you brew with it will be an ale.