Yes, ale and beer are defined as the same thing. I'm just trying to explain that in the UK (it may be different in the US) the terms have different nuances in meaning, i.e. in everyday usage of the terms in the UK. These nuances are nothing to do with quality, just the type of ale or beer being referred to.

So, here you can call any beer (including stout, porter, mild, bitter, fruit beer, light ale, dark ale, lager, etc., etc., etc.) a beer. But you wouldn't normally call some of these 'ales' (even if technically it might be correct to so so).

It's nothing to do with quality, it's just custom or convention. So calling something an 'ale' doesn't necessarily imply that it's higher quality than if you call it beer (which is what Ron seemed to think we were saying earlier).

It's just that certain types of beer would not be called 'ales'. The example I gave was keg lager. Yes, you could call it ale, but no-one does, to my knowledge.

So all ales are beers, but not all beers are ales, in our usage of the terms, even if the dictionary says the two terms mean the same thing.