Here you can learn all about one of the world's best disc golf courses: Ale Disc Golf Center: White Course in Nol, Sweden. Ale DiscGolfCenter is home to two of the World's Best Disc Golf Courses and has been renowned for years as one of the best disc golf destinations in the world – despite a scare when the Center was closed and put up for sale by an original co-founder. Luckily, a disc golfer bought the property, and it's alive and humming again.
Ale White is ranked #2 in the most recent World's Best Disc Golf Courses top 100 released annually by us here at UDisc. The rankings are based on millions of player ratings of over 16,000 disc golf courses worldwide on UDisc Courses, which is the most complete and regularly updated disc golf course directory in existence.
Read the whole post to get a full picture of Ale White or jump to a section that interests you most in the navigation below.
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- Basics: Times in top 100, year established, designers, cost, & availability
- History
- How hard is it?
- What's it like to play?
- Three real five-star reviews
Ale Disc Golf Center: White Course Course: Basic Info
- How many times has Ale Disc Golf Center: White Course made the annual World's Best Disc Golf Courses top 100 since the rankings were first released in 2020?
Year 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 Top 100? - When did Ale Disc Golf Center: White Course open?
2017 - Who designed Ale Disc Golf Center: White Course?
Camilla Grundén, Jonas Grundén, Dan Johansson - Is Ale Disc Golf Center: White Course free or pay-to-play?
Pay-to-play. See its UDisc Courses entry for pricing. - When is Ale Disc Golf Center: White Course available to play?
Seasonally spring through fall. Exact opening and closing dates are flexible and weather-dependent.
History of Ale Disc Golf Center – White Course
After a seventh-place showing in 2020's World's Best Disc Golf Courses, Ale's multiple tracks were ineligible for the list over the next three years due to to prior ownership ceasing operations in early 2021. But in late 2022, the property was sold, and the buyer – local entrepreneur Vincent Schaffler – wanted Ale to be a disc golf paradise again. Thanks to Schaffler's invesment, the hard work of Erik Mellgren and Simon Terbrant Säfström who now manage Ale's day-to-day operations, and a successful Kickstarter campaign, the Center's courses reopened for business in spring 2023.
The origins of Ale Disc Golf Center go back to the early 2000s. That's when former spouses Camilla Jernberg and Jonas Grundén got fed up after multiple projects to build disc golf courses on public land around Gothenburg – Sweden's second-largest city with a population of around 580,000 – ground to a halt after auspicious beginnings. There was only one way to be sure it wouldn't happen again: Buy land where they decided the priorities.
Their thorough search for the right real estate near Gothenburg eventually led them to a place 30 minutes north of the city.
"It was close to Gothenburg and big enough, which isn’t easy to find," Jernberg said. "It was an old farm that had been left abandoned for 15 years, so there was scrap and trash everywhere, really run-down. But the area and woods were beautiful."
Part of what created that beauty was the variety the property offered: heavily wooded areas, fields, big changes in elevation, and a meandering creek. Unable to imagine the type of work it would entail, the Grundéns gave in to the lure of a place with everything they needed to create an amazing place for disc golf despite the debris and decayed buildings on the verge of collapse. The land became theirs in 2013.
"After buying the land, we didn’t have a huge amount of money for other things, so we did a crazy amount of work by hand – like, way too much," Jernberg said.
And even after putting in "too much" work by hand, there were still certain things the pair just couldn't do themselves. One example is that they had to pay a company to take away about 20 tons of scrap metal from an area they wanted to build a fairway on. Luckily, selling the metal offset the cost of having it moved.
Something else they needed outside help with was cutting paths through walls of trees to create the wooded portions of Ale's courses.
"We decided how we wanted some of the holes designed and then we'd stretch long plastic bands through the trees to mark where they should be cut to make the fairways," Jernberg said. "We were a bit lucky because the guy driving the tree cutter was a disc golfer, so he understood why we wanted the trees cut in these strange shapes. It’s actually why we went with that company because cutting disc golf fairways isn’t the most efficient way to cut trees."
The back and wallet-breaking efforts of Jernberg and Grundén – as well as a third partner, Dan Johansson, who joined them after they purchased the property – resulted in the completion of Ale Disc Golf Center's Yellow Course in 2016 and White Course in 2017. The courses were immediate hits, and it didn't take long for Ale to earn renown throughout Scandinavia and Europe generally as a must-play destination.
Though Ale's reputation grew stronger, the relationship between Jernberg and Grundén flagged, and the two separated. The Center continued to operate for a while, but in late November 2020, Grundén announced that Ale would close in March 2021 and be put up for sale. It seems likely that a bid by Ale to host the Professional Disc Golf World Championships that was not accepted by the Professional Disc Golf Association catalyzed Grundén's decision.
Notably, after Ale's closing, Jernberg opened another course nearby called Uspatorp DiscGolfPark that has become a world top 100 course.
After nearly two years of being closed, the Swedish disc golf community was thrilled to get Ale Disc Golf Center back in 2023 thanks to Schaffler buying the land for around 12 million Swedish Krona, which is a bit under $1.2 million USD, in October 2022.
"We know the courses are special to many people but we had no idea how much it was missed by the entire disc golf community which had grown for two years while the course was closed," said Mellgren, the CEO of Alegruppen and Ale Disc Golf Center.
Given that Ale was relatively new when it closed, it didn't take long for nature to encroach on its fairways and wreak havoc on its infrastructure. Mellgren said it took a lot of time and effort to restore and improve the Center's courses throughout the last year, but the painstaking work has been worth it.
"There was a 'hallelujah' moment this summer when we took a moment to stop, raise our heads, and actually be proud of what we had accomplished!" Mellgren told us back in early 2024.
How Hard Is Ale Disc Golf Center – White Course & What's Par on It Rated?
Ale Disc Golf Center's White Course is designed for experinced, skilled players. Here's how its layout stacks up in terms of difficulty, distance, and more.
| Name | Distance |
Technicality | Overall Difficulty | Par Rating | Scoring Average |
| White | Very Long | Technical | Very Challenging | 260 | +20 |
You can find this information about this layout and other ways to play the course on Ale's White Course 's page on UDisc Courses.
Learn more about UDisc's disc golf course difficulty categories and our disc golf round rating scale in the posts below:
What's It Like to Play Ale Disc Golf Center – White Course?
Ale Disc Golf Center is home to Blue, Yellow, and White Courses. These courses are all separate entities spread out across the property and do not share baskets or fairways.
The White Course is the Center's hardest but most spectacular facility, and it's designed with skilled, experienced disc golfers in mind. Skilled, experienced disc golfers just like Emil Dahlgren, who has been one of Sweden's elite disc golfers for over a decade and provided his thoughts on what gives Ale's White Course that special something:
What makes the White Course good is that it tests everything in your game – distance, accuracy, touch, and making you think how you need to play to score. It gives you the option to go big off the tee or play more safe to go long on your second in a perfect balance. Both methods can get birdie, but you need to execute the shots well.
White also makes you shape shots in a way that's not common on longer courses, and you need to think about how you land your disc near the naturally elevated baskets and on the sloped fairways. You will need to have a well-rounded game, and when the wind picks up, you need to pick your places to be aggressive because leaving the fairway or the occasional OB line will bite your score hard.
What I like with the White Course is that it's disc golf. You will see players on a card play holes in a different way but end with the same score. And there are many types of players who can score well because of the mix of challenges. All this is carved out in a beautiful Swedish forest with amazing, handcrafted tees and benches around the course. Which makes this a place for every disc golfer's bucket list.
One thing Dahlgren didn't say explicitly that's worth noting about Ale White is its blend of deep woods, more open fairways, and holes that straddle both worlds. No matter what sort of disc golf you like best, you're likely to find multiple holes on Ale White that offer it to you.
Three Real Five Star Reviews of Ale Disc Golf Center: White Course
Three real reviews of Ale Disc Golf Center: White Course from disc golfers on UDisc.
Note that the publication date of this post reflects the last time we made minor updates to it. Some information has not changed since its last major update in 2024.
