Word.ws English Dictionary

real ale

real ale noun: beer brewed from traditional ingredients, matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed, and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide.

Noun

real ale (countable and uncountable, plural real ales)

  1. Beer brewed from traditional ingredients, matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed, and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide.
    • Camra’s campaign was about preserving a great British tradition. It focused, necessarily, on the past. It has been a success; more than 11,000 real ales are now brewed in the UK, accounting for more than 8% of a beer market that has shrunk by a third overall since 1980.2016 March 24, Jon Henley, “The aggressive, outrageous, infuriating (and ingenious) rise of BrewDog”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

Forms of real ale

pluralreal ales

Origin of real ale

Coined in 1973 by CAMRA.

Questions about real ale

What does real ale mean?
Real ale means beer brewed from traditional ingredients, matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed, and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide.
What part of speech is real ale?
Real ale is a noun.
What is the plural of real ale?
The plural of real ale is real ales.

Words near real ale in the dictionary

  1. reairs
  2. reais
  3. reak
  4. reaks
  5. real
  6. real ale
  7. real ales
  8. real analysis
  9. real and straight
  10. real axes
  11. real axis

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: real ale (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “real ale.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/real_ale. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.