Thanks for the discussion. I brought this up because a very well-respected English beer historian calls them both lagers online, saying that's what Germans call them. And so I posted my thoughts on r8beer, which has led to a decent discussion there. I wanted to ask you people here about it without mentioning that discussion first, to see what your impressions were, independent of that discussion.
Jürgen's answer reflects my own experience discussing this with Germans, both within the brewing industry (well, a couple of brewers, anyway) and normal drinkers.
My r8beer post, which I wrote before remembering how American homebrewers call these beers (in addition to "cream ale" and "Steam Beer(R)") "hybrid beers":
As a Yank, I grew up knowing that these were ales, since they’re top-fermented. The Yankee brewing universe has two basic kinds of beer: ale and lager. The absolute split between top- and bottom-fermenting yeast defines a beer as one or the other. Thus, bock, schwarzbier, Pils, hell, dunkel are all "lagers" and pale ale, stout, porter, barleywine, bitter, and the various top-fermented German beers are all "ales".
And this webbie’s style guidelines says so.
But then as I started to get more familiar with British views on beer, I started hearing the bizarre idea that Kölsch and Alt are in fact "lagers". They’re lagered, you see, cold-conditioned, and this over-rules the type of yeast used.
And, I think, "ale" has a more specific connotation to Britons than it does to Yanks. Something more to do with style, perhaps. "Ale" is British in origin, "top-fermenting" is technical.
Living in Germany, I’ve asked numerous people about this, both men in the street (more accurately, in the Biergarten) and those that know a thing or two about beer. None have said Kölsch is a lager, rather, a top-fermented beer.
It seems to me that Germans just don’t have the same distinct idea of "ale" as a separate entity to "top-fermented beer", in fact, the word doesn’t really properly exist in German outside of a British context. There’s "obergäriges/untergäriges Bier" (top/bottom-fermented beer) and then there are the various styles of top-fermented beer like Gose, Weizen-/Weißbier, Alt, and Kölsch.
To Germans, "Lager" is a sort of group of styles of bottom-fermented beer consisting of what would be considered Hell, Dunkel, and Export here, within a range of 10 - 14° Plato, but not including well-hopped beer like Pils, nor particularly roasted-malt beer like Schwarzbier. At least, that’s been my experience talking to brewers and drinkers.
So a German would never say Kölsch is an "ale", because that would imply it’s British, assuming the German in question even knows what ale is. But nor do they say it’s a "lager", since that would imply it’s bottom-fermented and grouped with Hell & Export. And so Germans have a distinct classification for them: Kölsch and Altbier.
So that’s settled then.
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OT: Kölsch & Altbier Background: Neither Ale nor Lager by Jürgen Wening on 2015-12-02 00:54:43