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When did people stop being drunk all the time?
- Flatcircle 3y agoThere's trend amongst the start up crowd to turn to abstinence from alcohol. Wonder where it leads?
- ethbr0 3y agoBack to Chumbawamba blaring and excess in ~20 years.
- quickthrower2 3y agoBorn Slippy too!
- goatlover 3y agoLife doesn't nee to be all or nothing. No reason for abstinence unless one has a problem.
- bityard 3y agoThere are valid reasons to avoid alcohol even without an addiction.
- goatlover 3y agoThere are also valid reason not to avoid it. I never claimed people should drink. But there's nothing wrong if they want to.
- joos3 3y agoPlenty of reason for it. Even small amounts are toxic and raise your risk of cancer, liver disease, f*k up your sleep etc.
- 3-cheese-sundae 3y agoCan be said about many of the things we partake in that evoke pleasure.
- joos3 3y agoNot really. e.g. caffeine and nicotine don’t have harmful side effects. Neither do spending time with your friends or loved ones.
- dbsmith83 3y agoI'll just leave this here before you continue spouting more nonsense Harmful effects of nicotine https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363846/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363846/ I'm sure even a cursory search for caffeine will reveal some harmful side effects as well. Especially for people with certain conditions
- ip26 3y agoCaffeine impairs your quality of sleep taken too close to bed, where “too close” is after 12pm.
- ethbr0 3y agoThis. The half life of caffeine is ridiculous, compared to our assumptions.
- ben-schaaf 3y agoCaffeine increases blood pressure and is associated with arrhythmia. It also disrupts sleep, causing caffeine-induced sleep disorder. Prolonged consumption of caffeine results in dependence, causing withdrawal when dosage is reduced. Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5445139/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5445139/
- uh0h 3y agoComputer use has health side effects Sun Air Cars Electricity Lack of universal healthcare Industrial Development Politicians Life is the leading cause of death
- zhte415 3y agoPlenty of reasons. Is to consider consumption of alcohol a norm a problem?
- anon373839 3y agoPersonally, I just don’t enjoy the effects of alcohol. I don’t like feeling fuzzy-headed or dehydrated. So, although I do love the taste of scotch or red wine, I rarely have them.
- chasd00 3y agoIt leads to straightedge and bad music. …and violence/fighting somehow too.
- LegitShady 3y agobut occasionally microdosing LSD
- quickthrower2 3y agoAren't modern drinks more alcoholic? 5% by vol beers, 12.5% wines.
- dr_orpheus 3y ago"The amount of alcohol consumed by drinking historical beer brews is between 0.62 to 0.107, the % of alcohol in “small beer” is taken to be around 0.05 and the % in “strong beer” is taken to be around 0.135" Although it doesn't specify weight or volume, but the 5% alcohol beer seems to be equivalent of the "small beer". There are also the "pure alcohol" charts in the table that I think try and account for it. Also there's the comment about beer for sailors in the 10-15% range.
- 26fingies 3y agoThey did have a couple data points for volume. A historical average of ~1 liter of beer or wine per day is mentioned at the beginning of the post. Further down it seems English sailors had a daily ration of 4.5 liters(!!) of strong beer. So taken together it seems modern people are indeed an awful lot less drunk than they were in the middle ages. If you’re referring to the “0.05” figure i think that is just out of a unit of 1. IOW multiply by 100 to get %. They use % in other parts of the post.
- tnecniv 3y agoYeah my understanding was that they drank large volumes of low ABV beer in the Middle Ages and did so in part because it was safer than many water sources
- klodolph 3y agoI don’t know where that myth comes from. It doesn’t seem to have foundation in the historical record.
- worthless-trash 3y agoWe have very little evidence the sun rose every back then either, but we can make educated reasoning based on evidence.
- ehPReth 3y agoI want to go back to that era.. imagine not having to think as much. Imagine being more.. free.
- Aloha 3y agoImagine food costing 10x more in constant units of money, having articles of clothing take a months wage, etc.
- heyoni 3y agoThat sounds wonderful. I already wear the same outfit all the time.
- Spivak 3y agoHumans are really good at getting used to things. There's a chance that even with a life that's worse on paper compared to modern life you end up happier. Think about it this way. We are living in an era that will eventually be thought of as a time where people couldn't imagine how we lived.
- Aloha 3y agoThats any era, honestly. While I think we might have too much choice now, I think moving back to a 1600 level of choice (and inequality spread) would make me miserable personally. Also, I like not dying at 35 (am over 35 now).
- fbdab103 3y agoTake heart - you most likely would have died before the age of five. If you survived past that, you were likely to make it well past 35. Historically high childhood mortality is what pulls down average life expectancy.
- greatpostman 3y agoWe’re getting scammed. I really don’t think people worked as much
- JohnMakin 3y agoIs it just me or does this read like a highschool paper with wikipedia sources?
- gpuhacker 3y agoIt does. There's an overuse of graphs and especially the lack of units and y-axis labels on some of the graphs was annoying, but overall it's still a quite interesting and entertaining read in my opinion.
- offices 3y agoSubstack is a good display of why editors exist. Any time I read a Substack link on HN, it's twice as long as it needs to be.
- dboreham 3y agoFor me it was when I moved from the UK to Silicon Valley.
- ianmcgowan 3y agoGot to admit those Friday afternoon "pub lunches" were great for team-building though, right? :_)
- babypuncher 3y agoIt's the thing I miss most about working in the office. We would take an extra long lunch almost every Friday at a local bar down the street, then come back to the office and mostly work on skunkworks projects. Some of our most creative stuff came from those Fridays. Now my Fridays are filled with the same monotony as the rest of the work week.
- lIIllIIllIIllII 3y agoPeople don't know how to work remotely. It's still kind of a new concept in the mainstream after all. You need to make social engagements during the day with friends. Otherwise it's lonely and isolating. as a nice plus, seeing your actual friends is much nicer than seeing your workplace "friends" who'd likely sell you out for half a dollar. Go grab lunch at a pub, coffee, do some exercise or whatever.
- irrational 3y agoBetween my wife and children and neighbors and friends, I am the opposite of lonely and isolated. Not every remote worker is a hermit.
- irrational 3y agoMy company just gives us Friday afternoons off.
- totallywrong 3y ago
- kstrauser 3y agoTypically when they started having to be somewhere early the next day, in my experience.
- idontwantthis 3y agoThere's a passage in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography when he is working in a printing factory in England, and he astounds the other workers by his productivity. He credits it to not being drunk all the time, and eventually managers to convince the other workers to try it too. That was 1740s I believe.
- jeffbee 3y agoAnd did that accrue to the labor force or did the owner just get more profits?
- idontwantthis 3y agoI went and checked for you. The ones who stopped drinking saved a lot of money and were healthier and Franklin actually made money off of the ones who kept drinking by lending them money when they ran out.
- drewcoo 3y agoThe Ballmer Peak for printers. https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/ballmer-peak/ https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/ballmer-peak/
- darth_avocado 3y agoIf someone does the analysis, I’m willing to bet that it coincided with when “work” started being structured around fixed hours and needing you being sober. Historically people used to work way less (hours and number of days). When that is the case, it’s very easy to be drunk all the time.
- flatline 3y agoThe article talks quite a bit about this.
- tomjen3 3y agoThe article is in Danish, but apparently until 1917 it was normal to be super drunk at work: so much so that many factory workers would drink half a bottle of booze before lunch and the rest after lunch + whatever beers was normally drunk. In 1917 the taxes on booze went sky high and the drinking crashed, but it wasn't unusual to be drunk at work. https://videnskab.dk/kultur-samfund/braendevins-historie-snapsens-storhedstid-og-pludselige-fald/ https://videnskab.dk/kultur-samfund/braendevins-historie-sna...
- searealist 3y agoWhen you do the math on the historical average, it comes out to 2-3 beers per day, hardly drunk all the time.
- tomcam 3y agoRaised by alcoholics during the Mad Men days so in reaction I never drank at all. My parents didn’t set a great example. I spent many an hour with a bag of library books outside bars while they boozed it up. But I often think about the framers of the Constitution drinking vast quantities that fateful, blistering summer of 1787: http://johnjayhomestead.org/wp-content/uploads/In-the-Cups-of-the-Founders.pdf http://johnjayhomestead.org/wp-content/uploads/In-the-Cups-o... They were, and remain, literally some of the most functional human beings in history. Fascinates me to see these two extremes in behavior.
- smegger001 3y agoLess liquor and much of the beer was whats called small beer or table beer and had very low ABV between 0.5 and 2.0%. George Washington in particular was fond of brewing a bran and molasses based small beer.
- User23 3y agoFranklin warns against “dram drinking” in his excellent autobiography.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y agoIt was 4.5L per day though. Enough to stupefy any man or keep them drunk all day. "For sailors the beer supplied was of the strong kind (10%-15% alcohol) since this was the only kind that preserved itself well in the sea, hence drunk as a sailor."
- crooked-v 3y agoThough historical sailors in various navies were punished if they were visibly intoxicated while on duty (off-shift was fine, of course), so either they were incredibly functional alcoholics, they were great at pacing themselves, or that booze was heavily watered down.
- robga 3y agoWho drinks 4.5L of anything a day? That’s 18 x 250ml glasses.
- atourgates 3y agoI found this article a bit hard to follow, though it's an interesting topic. The constantly changing units of consumption, historical timing, changes between daily and annual rates of consumption and similar made it difficult to understand exactly the point that was being made. The author dug up a lot of data and put it together, but didn't going the extra step of unifying things in a way that's easy to understand. I kept having to convert the units they were using to units I could understand, and since those units weren't constant, it's difficult to get an overall impression. But, a few examples I did convert to amounts of drinking I understand: * In Florence in 1455, someone (IDK if this is an average, an individual, a certain class of people or what?) drank 250L of wine in a year. That's about .9 modern size bottles of wine per day. A good amount, but I expect if you were practiced at it and drank it fairly evenly throughout the day, you certainly wouldn't appear drunk. * In the medieval city of Ghent, the apparent average per person annual consumption was ~40-liters wine and ~1300-liters beer. That works out to basically 7.5 pints (16oz, or the size of one of the tall cans of that craft beer often comes in in the US) of beer every day, and a quite small glass of wine. Depending on how strong the beer was (doesn't specify if this was small ~5% or strong ~12% beer), I expect even a practiced drinker would be quite tipsy after close to 8 pints and a touch of wine every day. * Sailors got a ration of 8 pints of strong (13% ABV) beer a day, which would have me absolutely knocked off my feet. 3 pints of what I think of as strong beer (~6-8%) in any kind of close succession and I'm definitely feeling tipsy, and shouldn't be let anywhere near something so complex as rigging. Though, after reading a few books on naval life aboard 16th century British sailing ships, perhaps being totally out of it for as much of the journey as possible would be a solid survival tactic. * The "historical average" (IDK what period of history, or how average) beer consumption was around 380 liters per person per year. That's just over 2.2 pints per person per day. A long way from "being drunk all the time", even if it was higher ABV strong beer (and it certainly wasn't all high ABV). Certainly, people seemed to have drunk much more in the past than they do today, but it's hard to make clear conclusions when the units are all over the place.
- noja 3y ago> doesn't specify if this was small ~5% or strong ~12% beer iirc "beer" as it was back then was more like 0.5% ABV
- xyzal 3y agoSome of the numbers seem unreal. Earlier this week I drank 3 beers (1,5L) which is an exception (i mostly do not drink at all) and the next day I had to take sick leave.
- x86x87 3y agoIf you drink more often this is probabably not a problem. Your body adapts.
- b800h 3y agoTrue within limits!
- AntiRemote 3y ago[dead]
- astrange 3y agoTry whatever the local version of Liquid IV is.
- asdajksah2123 3y agoThe Pareto effect applies to alcohol consumption as well. 20% of the people consume 80% of the alcohol.
- searealist 3y agoThat's really unusual.
- hparadiz 3y agoI almost never drink so when I do..... there's a very high chance I'll be nursing a migraine the next day. I've recently started to have a glass of wine after dinner in an attempt to train my body to tolerate it. It seems to be working.
- baq 3y ago3 bud lights? Yeah. 3 unfiltered IPAs? I’m not getting up from bed the next day.
- ke88y 3y ago> They were, and remain, literally some of the most functional human beings in history. All of human history? Seems excessively generous tbh. > Fascinates me to see these two extremes in behavior. I too would need a half bottle of port to write about freedom and liberty while my slaves built me a countryside mansion.
- junofan 3y agoInterestingly they wrote about how they were worried the British would eventually enslave them. About 10% were captured and tortured during the war.
- crooked-v 3y agoClearly they knew from firsthand experience, as the slavers, how the slaves would be treated.
- ffhhttt 3y agoTo be fair it went both ways. Also they were mad at the British for not allowing them to steal Native American land in a disorganized way. You had to go the Crown which would negotiate with the tribe on your behalf etc. Washington (especially) of course had other ideas..
- junofan 3y agoYeah it’s one of the grievances in the Declaration of Independence. They were pretty explicit about what they wanted.
- hef19898 3y agoSo not just keeping slaves and getting tax excemptions but also being allowe to steal native american's land every way they want?
- chrisco255 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bane 3y agoI remember a story about the dome on the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Flower (the Duomo in Florence) -- the first and largest unsupported dome in the world in over a thousand years, built before the discovery of the Americas and on a structure that had been otherwise completed for over 130 years at the time (and which had taken 100 years to get there). In the telling, the architect, Filippo Brunelleschi was hired to solve the "how to build the dome" left by his predecessor, Arnolfo di Cambio in around 1300. Cambia had specified something that was basically science fiction at the time, a majestic dome, built without buttresses, using technology nobody knew how to create. A design competition in the mid-1300s reinforced the Florentine's desire for this incredible dome that nobody knew how to build. The problem? The fucking Pantheon in Rome. It existed, and at that time built over a thousand years prior. It demonstrated that it was possible to build domes and that the technology had been lost to humanity. Artists and architects worth their salt all spent time in Rome learning architecture and design from the ancient ruins, by then nearly a thousand years old. Brunelleschi, and his best friend Donatello, were no different, having visit Rome sometime in the early 1400s to study. Rome at the time was a decrepit, dangerous, insecure, place to go. However, based on what he learned, Brunalleschi developed concepts of architecture, light, balance, and other ideas, which garnered him commissions back in Florence. Based on his work and excellent delivery, the Medici (THE Medici family) hired him to build various things including the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence. Which, if you've been there, feels like a frustrated first draft of the Duomo. The Basilica of Santo Spirito is the second draft. Along the way he started working with vaults, then domes (very important!) There was a competition, Brunalleschi's friend, Donatello, provided an absolutely incredible scaled demo of Brunalleschi's concept, and he won the competition against rival Ghiberti. Once he won the commission, he set to work figuring out how to actually do it at scale. The "dome within a dome" architectural idea he inherited from prior work (technological debt!), but set out to create several new management and construction innovations which included: - a maturing of the "dome within a dome" concept - new hoisting machines - new designs which eliminated legacy concepts such as flying buttresses and strengthened traditional bricklaying concepts - entirely new management concepts: 1. Workers stay up in the construction site, going up and down hundreds of stairs was a waste of time (e.g. context shifting). 2. Resources, such as food and wine were to be brought to the workers in-place to save time and improve productivity. 3. The wine was to be diluted with water, similar to the quality of wine brought to pregnant women, this prevented drunkenness, as well as water-borne illnesses, which made the workers more productive. The dome, the lantern on top, and the four surround mini-dome took from 1420-1445 (with the dome completed in 1436). Remember, this was to build something had been lost, science fiction, technology of the ancients, merely a hundred years prior. Lessons for today: 1. Study what's come before 2. Honor your predecessors, but invent anyway 3. Focus on worker productivity, don't waste their time with context switching and perks that provide "nutrition-free" benefits. Other observations: 1. Humans had identified alcohol as both a way to make water safer to drink, and a problem for pregnant women. Fetal alcohol syndrome had been observed and a reduced intake of alcohol had been identified as a way to reduce the problem. 2. It was possible to negotiate worker relations in such a way that they didn't hate, offered them benefits, and improved productivity. 3. Everybody competes, killer demos and prior work win future work.
- toyg 3y agoIndustrial-revolution machines were often very angry dragons, requiring constant supervision and attention to avoid explosions or loss of limbs. That must have played a part. Also, industrialization saw the rise of the skilled workforce. People started earning more the more they could use their brain. It makes sense that they wouldn't want to numb it as much as they did before.
- weinzierl 3y agoI worked in a factory when I was still in school in the 90s. I had to put some metal parts into an injection moulding machine every 21 seconds for 2 stretches of 4 hours with a 45 minute break between. If I missed the 21 second deadline the machine stopped, a yellow light flashed and the foreman shouted at me. There was a switchboard with buttons for emergency breaks (e.g.toilet break). If you used it the machine stopped, a yellow light flashed and the foreman shouted at you. I don't write this to complain, actually for me doing this for a couple of weeks during summer recess was quite fun. After this experience I also totally see how you just cannot do a job like that for 40+ years without alcohol.
- jansan 3y agoI did something similar in the early 90s, placing parts into various machines (produced 15000 welding tips in one summer). At that factory drinking previously had been common among workers. They banned alcohol during weekdays after one worker fell into a spinning milling machine. But even after that those workers who came in on Saturdays were allowed to consume a limited quantity of beer.
- weinzierl 3y agoWhen I was there it also was the time when they started to crack down on the alcohol use during working hours, but beer was still allowed and sold during the break. Many didn't cope well with this and in the building I was working they had thrown out the contents of the first aid boxes to hide the beer bottles there.
- croes 3y agoI would like to see a comparison with Asia, where people discover earlier that you can boil water to kill dangerous pathogens, even if they didn't know what pathogens were yet.
- klodolph 3y agoHippocrates recommended that water be boiled and strained to purify it. People in the middle ages boiled, filtered, and even distilled water to purify it. The catch is that without germ theory, people mostly did this process to water which was obviously contaminated. If water looked clean and tasted clean, why purify it? Even people who should know germ theory still make this mistake—people who go backpacking will take water from a clear stream and drink it, unaware that there is a beaver dam upstream and giardia in the water.
- dirtyid 3y agoOr Islamic regions.
- oersted 3y agoHence tea, indeed. In many ways it filled (and still does, as does coffee) many of the same roles as alcohol. Certainly not the partying aspect, but as a beverage to have with food, relax or socialise with. Alcohol was consumed a lot more often in those more mundane contexts before.
- Pxtl 3y agoI've always been curious about the evolutionary implications of this. Something that big in diet for that long will have evolutionary impact. And since it's mind and behaviour-altering, I often wonder if human minds had to evolve to compensate for constant drunkenness. Are we all more obsessive and intelligent to make up for constant drunkenness making us sloppy and dumb?
- atomicnumber3 3y agoHumans have been anatomically modern for about 200k years, and sufficiently little about us has changed that an autopsy wouldn't find any differences unless it looked for things like the teeth and jaw showing a pre-grain/agriculture diet and things like that. (But our teeth and jaws would look like that too if we could kick this whole grain habit). Evolution is slow (unless it's a huge bottleneck event).
- Pxtl 3y agoEvolution is not necessarily slow. The Russian silver fox domestication experiment produced massive personality changes and even physiological changes in only 20 generations. As for humans, current scientific consensus is that 5000 years ago virtually no human adult could digest milk, and now lactose tolerance is prevalent in like 95% of European-descended people. And none of the above would appear in a visual inspection of a skeleton. I figure the kind of neurological and digestive adaptations to being perma-buzzed might be similar.
- robobro 3y agohttps://lefineder.substack.com/p/when-did-people-stop-being-drunk#footnote-anchor-1-130431490 https://lefineder.substack.com/p/when-did-people-stop-being-... There is a word for 0.62 alcohol beer: whiskey.
- viciousvoxel 3y agoIncorrect. Whiskey requires distillation. High proof beers are made using the same basic process as any other beer, but start with a higher concentration of fermentable sugars and an appropriate, higher alcohol-tolerant yeast. Cryoconcentration can also be use to increase ABV (e.g. Eisbocks)
- salynchnew 3y agoFWIW the beer people used to drink in antiquity had a rather low ABV. A better contemporary comparison might be be something like kombucha.
- airjtlwijt 3y agoI was thinking this. There were other types of beer and wine that had much lower alcohol content than what is typical today, just barely enough to keep it sterile, but the article mentions that the several liters of beer per day was sometimes 10-15%, which is damn high.
- richardwhiuk 3y agoI agree that's a convincing position, but I'm not convinced that it's supported by the evidence.
- airjtlwijt 3y agoMy parents never did! Hahahaha <sigh> :-(
- avithedev 3y agoNever drank, never will drink.
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoModern people drunk a lot, event recently. In France, 80 years ago, kids would drink wine at school. Drink and driving prevention and repression certainly played a big part in it. But I think other factors came at play: - Science. We know now better about the effect of alcohol. This drove the public opinion into a certain direction. Having the general acceptance this was a bad idea created policies to prevent things like having wine in schools in 1956: https://expat-in-france.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/wine-drinking-ban-french-school.jpg https://expat-in-france.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/wine-... - Hygiene. If you can drink water safely from the tap, it helps. - Moving to a service based society. If you don't have to work in a mine, you drink less. - Other drugs came around. The ones you identify as such. And the one that are more innocent, like sugar, tv shows and social medias.
- slau 3y agoDepends on your definition of "children". France only banned alcohol in lycées in 1981... only 42 years ago. Otherwise, you are right. The main ban (children under the age of 14) was in 1956, or 67 years ago.
- KeplerBoy 3y agoIs Alcohol banned in the french equivalent of a high school? It certainly is not here in Austria. 17 year olds drinking beer between their late afternoon classes is not unheard of and often tolerated.
- slau 3y agoLycée would be the equivalent of high-school, with a typical age of 15-18 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_education_in_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_education_in_France).
- miroljub 3y agoWhy would it not be tolerated? They are almost grown up. If they are considered mature enough to make their driver's license, why wouldn't they be allowed to drink?
- prmoustache 3y agoGiven the importance of the "gnôle" (a french word for a often home or clandestinaly made strong spirit in France) in rural parts of France to this day [1][2], I am pretty sure the author is underestimating the importance of spirits in history. [1] usually mixed with coffee several times during the day, and very often a shot glass in the evening [2] I've never seen a sober postman when I visited my grand parents as a kid in the 80's and 90's. Back in the days they weren't timed and would be invited for a coffee at every single farm they visited to talk about the news of the day. He really served as a local and vocal newspaper for all of them. The coffee itself wasn't strong in cafeine, but was almost always served with "la goutte", a small but significant amount of spirit.
- Namari 3y agoIt also depends of the region you live in. In Brittany for example people drunk a lot of watery wine and sweet cider but they drunk it in quantity for some of them. You canread in Jean-Marie Deguinet's "Mémoires d'un paysan bas breton" (19th centuary) that people were drinking a lot of cider and particulary his wife who was a cider Alcoholic. The gnole as you speak is more something that became popular amongst the Poilu during the first world war and after, I'm not sure if there was loads of people drinking it in the past but it feels like the spirits became more popular by the end of the 20th centuary.
- prmoustache 3y agoMy grandfather had a cider brewery and even the apple juice he made had a bit of alcohol from fruit fermentation. Something below 1% though so we drank it as kids. I would say in the case of cider you have to drink an awful lot to feel intoxicated, you definitely suffer from diarrea before you feel the alcohol.
- afroisalreadyin 3y agoIsn't [2] what happens in Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis? Postman is drunk every day at work, and his new boss thinks he's got a drinking problem. Turns out he gets served, or even forced to drink a nice glass of liquor at every stop.
- wirrbel 3y agoFrom a German perspective there was the “branntweinpest” in the 19th century in Prussia triggered by cheap and available liquor (Branntwein). This indicates to me that before the availability of cheap liquor alcohol consumption was more limited. Anecdotally I live in a wine growing region but the older generations would drink wine diluted with water, the local wine was a already produced in a way that it wasn’t entirely dry, I.e. more sugar less alcohol in the wine that then was diluted. So I find it reasonable to believe that people used to be for most centuries consuming alcohol but moderately affected. As in, they would not have appeared heavily intoxicated. Of course it would have affected their health and increased risk to become an alcohol addict, but then, it seems alcohol was actually not so cheap until cheap liquor from grains and potatoes became available. Beer used to be a seasonal drink due to lack of cooling, or without engineered yeasts it’s alcohol content low.
- stdbrouw 3y agoI remember reading an article one day that pointed out that intoxication is related to consumption in excess of what your liver can process instantaneously, so that a drinking session with a number of 5% beers may get you drunk but the same number of 4% beers will hardly register. The article is no longer available, but here’s a summary https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3209119/Why-5-beer-make-TWICE-drunk-4-version-Calculations-reveal-tiny-increase-strength-big-impact-intoxication.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3209119/Why-... and here’s a follow-up of sorts https://draftmag.com/how-many-beers-to-get-drunk/ https://draftmag.com/how-many-beers-to-get-drunk/
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- e40 3y agoIn the 70s as a teen in KY a neighbor family had a Manhattan dispenser in the kitchen. Like those juice machines at fast food restaurants. Had to hold a couple of gallons, at least, of brown liquid. No matter the time of day, they always had a glass nearby.
- brewdad 3y agoThat’s amazing. My liver thanks me for never thinking that was a good idea.
- wiredfool 3y agoThe first (iirc) Connections follows this and the changes that come from the introduction of coffeehouses (buzz vs blitz) through to the present (at least, 1970's) day.
- fsckboy 3y agoI don't like writing the obvious things that everybody always says, but here we are, nobody has said it yet: there was a book or paper out like 25 years ago that speculated that as the Age of Enlightenment coincided with the start of European tea and coffee drinking, the general uptick in the usage of stimulants instead of alcohol must have contributed to the intellectual flowering through to the Renaissance, at least for the literate classes. So that's when one group of people stopped being drunk all the time.
- HPsquared 3y agoTobacco also.
- isoos 3y agoI remember a similar read. I think it also helped that armies become more disciplined, could march longer (coffee was a stimulant vs. alcohol), also the workforce had fewer errors. Any chance that somebody knows the reference?
- clbrmbr 3y agoWhich way does the causal arrow point?
- bromuro 3y agoYet these stimulants were already consumed in other places in the world - before the europeans. why no Renaissance there? Or yes it had?
- Sakos 3y agohttps://www.txst.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definitions/Confusion-of-Necessary.html#:~:text=A%20sufficient%20condition%20is%20a,necessary%20elements%20must%20be%20there https://www.txst.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definition.... That's the difference between a sufficient condition and a necessary condition. It's likely a combination of factors were required that might not have been available in other places. But there were something akin to renaissances in other places before Europe, but changing environments/factors limited their impact or spread, or even outright ended them. I always find the argument "but why didn't this happen elsewhere" bizarre, when ... it usually has happened elsewhere. Ignorance isn't a great argument. Like, other places often had sewers and other sanitation long before Europe, which implies that alcohol could have been a limiting factor for Europe while not being a limiting factor elsewhere.
- grabbyalien 3y agoMany many people still drunk all the time
- hooby 3y agoLife was harsh, lots of work was physically taxing (no machines to do the heavy lifting), and there was not much in terms of relief for any sort of chronic or recurring pain, like back pain, tooth aches etc. Alcohol helps endure, as it made you more numb to such pains. It might also help you sleep at night, when otherwise your aching body might have kept you awake. In some physical jobs like the construction business, workers used to rely on alcohol to make through the work day until very recently. In some countries they might even still do so. I can confirm from my own experience building a house and doing heavy lifting on the construction site, that after 10 hours of taxing work, an evening beer works wonders to relax your strained muscles and regain some feeling of comfort. It's no surprise to me, that the reduction in alcohol consumption coincides with a switch from more hard physical labor, to more sitting jobs.
- laurels-marts 3y agoThere's a vast scientific literature suggesting that even small amounts of alcohol have adverse side effects on sleep. Sleep is the biggest factor in muscle recovery and in reducing inflammation. Therefore the best thing one could do for themselves to accelerate physical recovery would be to drink plenty of water and make sure they get enough hours of sleep. I think it's a bit like how I crave ice cold Coke when I'm thirsty on a hot summer day but then when I just drink tap water that craving reduces significantly. Therefore I know that my body really needed water but my brain translated in into a craving for Coke. There might be some similar learned behaviours between hard labourers and beer.
- hooby 3y agoI'm pretty sure that most medieval laborers were not aware of that scientific literature ;)
- rbanffy 3y agoAfter college. Sorry. Couldn’t resist. I’ll show myself out.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoI learned that water was quite untrustworthy, and that people drank (wine, mostly), in order to not die, evacuating from both ends.
- conaclos 3y ago> the elimination of “sacred Monday” as a day in which time is taken off work According to the table 3.10 [0], leisure time was greater on Monday than on Sunday. Do I understand it correctly? Monday was the previous Sunday in Christian societies? [0] https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/9c61347e-58fb-4d93-acbf-55b34e4d3e09_837x386.png https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/9...
- rcktmrtn 3y ago> Do I understand it correctly? Monday was the previous Sunday in Christian societies? Not sure exactly, but I think Sunday was always Sunday. It's Saturday that changed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Monday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Monday
- erie 3y agoMichael Pollan claims that alcohol was safer than water, then coffee came and boiling water stopped people from being drunk all the time, fueling the industrial revolution. There are still pockets of old habits where kids are given wine assuming it gives them strength, in Georgia and Abkhazia, where it is a big problem now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD6cYabx0nk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD6cYabx0nk
- jhoechtl 3y agoFor Austria I can assure that it happened somewhere between 1995 and 2000. It was a combination of many things though: Social ostracism of smoking; Gaming consoles and Internet which kept people in their flats/houses; Ubiquitous availability of alcohol measurement devices which effectively supported enforcing workplace security and liability of drunk driving.
- vallode 3y agoIn the region of Austria I live in (Oberösterreich/Upper Austria), smoking is so commonplace I'm surprised that people aren't handing cigarettes to children. It is also very common to see people inebriated from morning farmer's markets before 9am! I want to see a beer consumption graph by state/county of Austria. Wanted to chime in as my experience is so different from yours.
- renegade-otter 3y agoSome people in the US were all torqued in the 80s when you could no longer drink and drive. https://twitter.com/historyinmemes/status/1668510231897288704 https://twitter.com/historyinmemes/status/166851023189728870... "You can't drink when you want to, you have to wear a seatbelt. Pretty soon we'll be a Communist country". Does that echo, or what?
- aziaziazi 3y agoNot sure if the author is here, but small typo at the end: > The amount of alcohol consumed by drinking historical beer brews is between 0.62 to 0.107, the % of alcohol I think you meant “0.062” not “0.62” am I wrong ? Cheers for the informative article :)
- nottorp 3y agoOne point the article is missing is that when you do hard physical labor you won't even notice a couple beers drunk across the day. Which is not what happens when you sit on your ass in an office and have 3 beers in quick succession right after work.
- ChazDazzle 3y agoWhen Benjamin Franklin went to London to apprentice as a printmaker, his English peers in the print shop were impressed with both his industry and productivity. One other significant difference was that unlike his coworkers, he didn’t drink on the job.
- peoplefromibiza 3y ago> When did people stop being drunk all the time? When did people have ever been drunk all the time? People drank more because there was a lot less alcohol in the alcoholic beverages on average, but it was some people drinking a lot more (really, an awful lot more), not the average person drinking more than today. A person drinking a bottle of whisky a day would count as 22 drinks, the average today is around 1 drink per person per day, so that one person alone would count as 22 people. You don't see many people drinking that amount of alcohol today, but it wasn't uncommon in certain jobs in the recent past. Beers were similar to fermented milk they drink in Mongolia[1], wine had a similar alcohol content of today only for upper classes products, the average had higher alcohol content to preserve it better or it would spoil and taste like vinegar, but it was mostly drank mixed with herbs, honey and diluted with water (vinification was much different back then, the final product often reminded a syrup more than a liquid). For a lot of time in many places alcoholic beverages were also banned by religions on public health grounds. But the most important reason is that the "industry" of beverages (soda, juice, energy drinks, etc), advertising and marketing had not been invented yet. And probably the amount of stimulants and sugar we get from these "non-alcoholic " beverages are more damaging to our health than alcohol alone. For optimal health, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommend consuming no more than 6 tsp of added sugar daily. By drinking just one serving of cola a day, a person will easily exceed this amount. A 2015 study attributed 184,000 global deaths each year to the consumption of sugary drinks. this is sugary drinks alone, notice that when you look at the stats for alcohol related deaths, they also include incidents or accidents where someone had some alcohol (> 0) in their system, the same stats are not kept for sugar/caffeine/stimulants in general. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumis
- eightysixfour 3y agohttps://vinepair.com/booze-news/sixteenth-century-beer-abv/ https://vinepair.com/booze-news/sixteenth-century-beer-abv/ There is plenty of reason to believe these beers were not <1% alcohol as is often described. A 16th century English soldier receiving 7-8 pints a day of 2-5.5% beer is between 2.25 fl oz and 7 fl oz of pure alcohol - so between 4 - 11.5 “standard drinks” a day, assuming that was their only consumption.
- taco_emoji 3y agoAxes not labeled. Come the fuck on.
- csense 3y agoI always thought "Water, water, everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink" didn't refer to alcohol at all, but was simply pointing out that sailors can ironically die of thirst on a ship literally surrounded by water, because salt water isn't drinkable.
- century19 3y agoNever heard it before but what you say sounds correct.
- mharig 3y agoWhen the transition of the population from consenting adults to productive livestock (consumists) took place. I.e. during the industrial revolution, and much more extremely nowadays.
- MoSattler 3y agoI remember reading somewhere that historically, the alcohol content in beer was considerably lower (as low as 0.5% IIRC) than it is today. I'm not sure if the article takes this into account - I might have missed that detail.
- nashashmi 3y agoPub houses are abbreviation for Public houses in Ireland. And that is where people drank.
- bratgpttamer 3y agoRecently, I was drinking with a (Russian) friend who commented that I'm the only one he struggles to keep up with while drinking and that he goes home blackout drunk every time we hang out. We don't drink that much, and decided maybe we're just getting old. We both noted how we used to drink a lot more, meaning we're just as cool and fashionable as The Kids These Days, who are according to several news reports drinking less than college kids were a decade or so ago. A few days later, he said he figured it out: for each of the ~3-4% ABV beers I drink, he's drinking a ~7-8% IPA. Him "catching up" (round for round/pint for pint) was consuming twice the alcohol as I was. I said I'd noticed that myself, when moving to a major city where most beers were $8 IPAs - having a couple beers at lunch would make me tired, if not drunk, and I'd need a cup of coffee on the way back to get going again. I'm too lazy to do The Math, but I can't help but wonder how the "Kids These Days Drink Less Alcohol" charts line up with the "Kids These Days Seem To Prefer IPAs" chart. (It seems ABV has little to do with the historical trend presented here, though) > Wine is taken to be 0.12 alcohol, the same number is used in modern estimates of alcohol consumption. The amount of alcohol consumed by drinking historical beer brews is between 0.62 to 0.107, the % of alcohol in “small beer” is taken to be around 0.05 and the % in “strong beer” is taken to be around 0.135, the relative consumption of small and strong beer is depended on whether we use the numbers from “Vandelint 1734” or the estimates in the studies mentioned in table 2.1 in “Alcohol, Sex, and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe”
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y agoIf anything I've been seeing the IPA craze die down for some years now (though I am in San Diego, which was kind of at the forefront). I don't know a lot of college kids, but the people in their mid-twenties that I know seem to be shifting away from beer entirely, and are drinking more hard seltzers in casual settings and cocktails in bars. Both can be quite alcoholic. That said, they're also much more casual about consuming cannabis since it's been legal their whole adult lives, which often leads to them drinking less when they go out.
- OfferFun6595 3y agoProbably it has to do with the huge shift to non alcoholic beverages like coffee and tea which is a modern day drug?