Albert algebras, a specific kind of Jordan algebra, are naturally distinguished objects among commutative nonassociative algebras and also arise naturally in the context of simple affine group schemes of type
$\mathsf {F}_4$
,
$\mathsf {E}_6$
, or
$\mathsf {E}_7$
. We study these objects over an arbitrary base ring R, with particular attention to the case
$R = \mathbb {Z}$
. We prove in this generality results previously in the literature in the special case where R is a field of characteristic different from 2 and 3.