Lager is a light-coloured beer, usually pale gold, often served cold. It tastes cleaner and crisper than dark beers such as stout, or than many ales. When someone asks for “a lager”, they often mean a glass of it, not the type in the abstract. Most of the ordinary yellow beers you see in shops are lagers. The name is German: Lagerbier was beer made to be stored — Lager means a store, a place where you keep things — and brewers still let this beer rest cold for a time. Though actually, in everyday talk the word has stretched: people say lager for “the usual pale beer”, even when it was not made in the old German way. It is an everyday pub and shop word, not fancy.