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> If you want safe water, all you have to do is boil it. That's not necessarily true. Boiling will protect you from ingesting live parasites or bacteria, but i

> If you want safe water, all you have to do is boil it. That's not necessarily true. Boiling will protect you from ingesting live parasites or bacteria, but it will not protect you from potential toxins that might have been produced by the bacteria. It will not protect you from pollutions like heavy metals either, but neither will alcohol. Alcohol would have the advantage over boiling water that the bacteria would not be in the alcohol in the first place so they could not have produced something bad for you in the water. Also, as someone else pointed out, if you don't understand why some water makes you sick, and don't understand how to treat the water to keep it safe, how are you gonna start boiling water? Does it give you something beneficial apart from the not yet made connection of safety? no. What gives alcohol the big advantage here is that the safety-thing is a side-effect. People drank because they liked it, and the hypothesis is they also gained better survival because it happened to have antiseptic features as well.

stdbrouw 10y ago
> Alcohol would have the advantage over boiling water that the bacteria would not be in the alcohol in the first place so they could not have produced something bad for you in the water. This might hold for liquor (depending on what destillation removes and retains), but 90-95% of beer is boiled water and the bacteria would most definitely have been in there in the first place.
- Karlozkiller 10y ago
  I actually enjoy brewing beer in my spare time. You're right in that it is a lot of water in beer, but if you had a contamination of bacteria in an early batch you would get the problem of the bacteria competing with the yeast. If the contamination is introduced after a certain point of fermentation, newly introduced bacteria would no longer get a hold because of the alcohol levels. So in short, you are correct in that if you start brewing with contaminated water you will get the same problem in the end product.

stdbrouw 10y ago

> Alcohol would have the advantage over boiling water that the bacteria would not be in the alcohol in the first place so they could not have produced something bad for you in the water. This might hold for liquor (depending on what destillation removes and retains), but 90-95% of beer is boiled water and the bacteria would most definitely have been in there in the first place.

Karlozkiller 10y ago
I actually enjoy brewing beer in my spare time. You're right in that it is a lot of water in beer, but if you had a contamination of bacteria in an early batch you would get the problem of the bacteria competing with the yeast. If the contamination is introduced after a certain point of fermentation, newly introduced bacteria would no longer get a hold because of the alcohol levels. So in short, you are correct in that if you start brewing with contaminated water you will get the same problem in the end product.