Other forms: beers
Beer is the alcoholic drink brewed from malted grain, with foam on top. A pint of beer, cold beer, brew beer.
The four ingredients are water, malted barley, hops and yeast, and the German purity law of 1516 permitted only those. Ale and lager are the two great families, distinguished by the yeast and the fermentation temperature. Note beer garden, beer mat, small beer meaning something trivial; and that beer is the third most drunk beverage in the world after water and tea.
1nounbeerAn alcoholic drink brewed from malted grain.
“A pint of beer there costs about five pounds.”
beer is a drink.
Old English beor probably comes from a Latin word for a drink, from bibere, to drink — the same root as beverage and imbibe. Ale is the older native word and beer was for a long time the imported one.
Old English
bēor
Middle English
ber
English, today
beer
From Middle English ber, from Old English bēor. From Middle English ber, bere, from Old English bēor (“beer”) (Oxford OED notes: "rare, except in poetry"), from Proto-West Germanic beuʀ, from Proto-Germanic beuzą (“beer”) (putatively from Proto-Indo-European bʰewsóm), meaning “brewer's yeast”. However, also see the [https://www.etymonline.com/word/beer#etymonline_v_8236 "beer" entry on EtymOnline] (q.v.), which links a connection to monastic Vulgar Latin biber (“a drink, beverage”), from Latin bibere (“to drink”). Samuel Johnson in his famous 18th-century A Dictionary of the English Language guessed it was from (unattested) Welsh bîr; he distinguished it in his time from ale — the ancient usual word — by beer being older-aged and/or smaller.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA