Weeelll ...
I wouldn't say making lager or ale is harder or easier, The actual beer part is identical till the temp. of fermentation and type of yeast comes in. Say you make ten gallons of beer wort, you can divide it in two and make a lager w/lager yeast at a low temp. and an ale w/ale yeast at room temp. and although it started out w/the identical wort (soup) because of the yeast and temps. fermented at/with they will taste totally different. The style is mostly personal taste and if you can keep temps. constant. Whether you make a nice lager is mostly if you can keep it at the desired cold temp. As ale is room temp. it is what most people have the physical ability to do and is an excellent beer too.
"There are no truths;
There are no facts;
It's all a matter of style."
-unknown-
Malt-malting-malted refers to barley grains that have undergone a specific treatment to make it able to make beer. Barley, wheat, whatever is a starch and it is necessary to react any starch with the enzymes that are produced from 'malting' barley specifically. What they do is take regular barley and germinate it till the sprout is 1/2 the length of the grain and then dry it. What that does is when it sprouts certain enzymes are produced and it is these enzymes that when making beer transforms the starch in any grain to sugars which then yeast can feed on and bleep out CO2 and alcohol. Alcohol is yeast pee when it feeds on sugar.
The hardest part of making beer as opposed to whine or higher alc. brews is that as the alc. content is so low in most beers it allows things to grow that higher alc. doesn't which gets back to the sterilize .... sterilize ....... sterilize
If it has ANY amount of barley in it it's beer. If no barley, not beer. Beer-like refreshment made out of wheat isn't beer it's weizen. Liquor made out of honey is mead. It's all good, just semantics.
B.T.W. - I found out thru trial and tribulation that yeast strain has the most effect on what the final product will taste like. Until pure strain beer yeasts arrived that we small guys could buy, no matter out of what, or how I made beer it tasted like home made crap. So the hard way I found out that yeast is the most important part of fermentable bevvy's actual taste. Hence the bread yeast is good for bread but not for booze.
As well as you bring up about headaches from some and not all. That comes back to yeast strains as some will make only ethanol and some make fusel alcohols etc. also which is neither good or bad re:Belgian Lambic's. "It's all a matter of style" lol
As I slurrily type this, once to get it down and once again to correct it lol, I'm into my own 'Steam beer dispensed out of a soda fountain system as bottling is the other part of beer making that s__cks. lol
Oh yea, a whole range of different styles of yeast for all sorts of beers, ciders, meads, whines are easily and cheaply available from any reputable home brew store. Or on line. Actually yeasts is a whole field called zymurgy, the last word in an english dictionary (maybe lol)
cheers
peter