9 ms·

Until the 14th century women dominated the field of beer brewing

105 points by beardyw 3y ago

thriftwy 3y ago
...in a 500 mile radius blurb around Blue Banana.
DeathArrow 3y ago
I'm sure men dominated the field of beer drinking.
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
The link makes the claim that only small ale was drunk in medieval times because water was considered unhealthy, but I thought that was an urban myth? From the depiction of the home as the woman’s sphere in medieval Northern European literature, it isn’t surprising that brewing was women’s work along with cooking in general.
- tgv 3y ago
  https://history.howstuffworks.com/medieval-people-drink-beer-water.htm https://history.howstuffworks.com/medieval-people-drink-beer... https://gizmodo.com/no-medieval-people-didnt-drink-booze-to-avoid-dirty-w-1533442326 https://gizmodo.com/no-medieval-people-didnt-drink-booze-to-... No idea what the concensus is, but it also doesn't make sense that everyone drank beer instead of water. Young children almost certainly didn't drink beer. And I expect it to have been out of reach for large parts of the population: cost and availability of ingredients.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    I specifically said small beer, and that is something that has been commonly served to children in various places even into modern times. Your claim that beer was too costly also seems to be based on how beer is made and sold today: back then, beer was made without hops, and grain was available to medieval peasants because they were growing it themselves. A sort of beer was drunk by the working classes in Ancient Egypt, it has never been an elite drink.
    - User23 3y ago
      Many people don’t realize that yeast leavened bread is about 1% alcohol and as high as 2%. Obviously we let children eat it. Why would small beer at the same percentage be a problem?
      - elcomet 3y ago
        Alcohol evaporates when the bread cooks
        jameshart 3y ago
        Seems like the consensus is that some remains. A lot of online sources cite a 1926 study that said bread can have ‘up to 1.9%’ alcohol content. This more recent study from 1998 suggests that 0.4-0.6% ethanol by mass is more typical: https://auventdunord.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/food-alcohol-content.pdf https://auventdunord.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/food-alco...
        User23 3y ago
        Some of it, but not all of it or even the majority[1]. For reference some breads bake in as little as 20 minutes so a fair bit of alcohol remains. [1] https://www.isu.edu/news/2019-fall/no-worries-the-alcohol-burns-off-during-cookingbut-does-it-really.html https://www.isu.edu/news/2019-fall/no-worries-the-alcohol-bu...
      - groestl 3y ago
        And a very ripe banana can have an ABV value of 0.4%.
        jameshart 3y ago
        That sugar in fruit gradually turns into alcohol should not be a surprise to anyone. Really ‘ripe’ grape juice can have an ABV of over 14% :)
        groestl 3y ago
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    AIUI consensus is that people did drink water but also quite a lot of beer. "Young children almost certainly didn't drink beer." - wanna bet? > In his A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education, in Boarding Schools published 1797, writer Erasmus Darwin agreed that "For the drink of the more robust children water is preferable, and for the weaker ones, small beer ..."
    - mewpmewp2 3y ago
      To be honest if you are unaware of the bad effects of beer or how addiction works in general, it seems like a thing that you would get so easily addicted to. If I had a different knowledge set and easy access to beer, perhaps I would just drink it daily. Without water I imagine there are going to be massive hangovers though.
      - 7thaccount 3y ago
        I assume these beers were pretty low ABV. Addiction to alcohol probably was pretty common and perhaps preferable to dysentery.
        878654Tom 3y ago
        Yes, this is called Small Beer or Table Beer in Belgium. It goes as low as 1% and was very normal in schools and at homes before clean water was a common thing. It still is a very popular beer to drink while you eat but children don't consume it anymore. My father did tell me that when he was younger (1970-1980) they still drank it at the table in his school.
        kwhitefoot 3y ago
        I don't know when the rules changed but when I was a child in England in the sixties anything less than 2% could be sold to anyone, it wasn't regarded as properly alcoholic. The brand I remember is Top Deck Shandy, half and half lemonade and light beer.
      - 3y ago
  - VoodooJuJu 3y ago
    Young children did drink it, and it's still served to children today in Finland: https://www.brewingnordic.com/farmhouse-ales/small-beer-called-kalja/ https://www.brewingnordic.com/farmhouse-ales/small-beer-call...
    - mewpmewp2 3y ago
      I somewhat remember my parents offering me a drink to try out when I was 6 or 7. Not sure if it's a made up hint of memory. It definitely wasn't something frequent or high dosage though. I actively started drinking with peers around the age of 12 - 14. That was in secrecy from parents though, asking homeless to buy us the goods.
      - gostsamo 3y ago
        My parents definitely offered me alcohol when I was a child. The hard alcohol was mostly to show me how it burns the throat and not to try it, while beer was bitter but okay for a sip or two to feel grownup. Alcohol also had a medicinal use in the family, though I'm not sure about the medicinal effect. After I was 14 and more, alcohol was introduced on more regular bases, but not with social pressure to drink, just was available as an option. Decades later, I'm just a social drinker.
        kwhitefoot 3y ago
        I had essentially the same experience. I'm 67 now. My grandmother used to give me a miniature of De Kuyper's Cherry Brandy for Christmas from when I was six or seven, I made it last until after New Year!
  - tokai 3y ago
    What a peak HN comment - authoritative and wrong. Kids most definitely did drink alcohol. https://web.archive.org/web/20110306073320/http://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09AR/09ara431.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20110306073320/http://digital.li...
    - tengbretson 3y ago
      What was the authoritative part?
      - beastman82 3y ago
        This. The irony is too much
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
        I assume the GP was chuckling at how the OP offered two authoritative (well, not really) links to support a claim in my top-level post, but then went on to make an erroneous claim himself.
        tokai 3y ago
        No not at all. Its is true and well documented claim that people didn't drink alcohol at all times instead of water. The links and what he is claiming is not overlapping.
      - tokai 3y ago
        >certainly didn't drink beer >out of reach for large parts of the population Claims that the poster base on nothing at all, but still claim it in a peremptory fashion.
        tengbretson 3y ago
  - CalRobert 3y ago
    And yet there are people alive today who enjoyed a glass of wine as a schoolchild in France. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/french-children-wine-at-school/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/french-children-wine-at-sc...
- dmurray 3y ago
  > it isn’t surprising that brewing was women’s work along with cooking in general. What's interesting here is precisely that brewing beer was a domestic job (and therefore women's work), in a way that baking bread, for example, was not. > most villages depended on local bakers to prepare bread ... Most households alternated between making their own ale and buying from and selling to neighbors
  - ecshafer 3y ago
    From my understanding, ovens were often large communal or commercial ovens in the middle ages and renaissance periods. The poor wouldn't have had an oven in their home.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - Tanoc 3y ago
      Very much so. Most homes would have had either a fire pit or a hearth. It was too resource intensive to design something just for cooking when you could also use it for heat, light, and warding off bugs.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - globular-toast 3y ago
    > in a way that baking bread, for example, was not. This probably just comes down to availability of equipment. Bread making in the home has been common in places like England and India for a long time. In places like Austria and France the preference is for bread that is best from special ovens that people don't have at home, but even there people would make things like brioche at home.
    - Scaevolus 3y ago
      Baking in large ovens has massive, obvious economies of scale in terms of fuel use per gram of bread. It's very natural to become centralized. Brewing is more efficient in terms of labor as you scale up to larger containers, but it's less extreme.
verisimi 3y ago
[flagged]
tiahura 3y ago
I had a little wife, the prettiest ever seen, She washed all the dishes and kept the house clean. She went to the mill to fetch me some flour, She brought it home in less than an hour. She baked me my bread, she brewed me my beer, She sat by the fire and made good cheer.
- ConfusedDog 3y ago
  I had a little wife, and I am in jail. She didn't know how to cook, nor did any chores. She went to the nail salon, and brought a new fellow. She took my house, I drank in sorrow.
CalRobert 3y ago
And we have them to thank for witches' hats! """ They wore the tall, pointy hats so that their customers could see them in the crowded marketplace. They transported their brew in cauldrons. And those who sold their beer out of stores had cats not as demon familiars, but to keep mice away from the grain. Some argue that iconography we associate with witches, from the pointy hat to the cauldron, originated from women working as master brewers. """ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/women-used-dominate-beer-industry-until-witch-accusations-started-pouring-180977171/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/women-used-dominate-b...
- felideon 3y ago
  Or not... see the editor's note.
  - CalRobert 3y ago
    Well that's what I get for remembering a thing I read a few years back, googling for a source, and then not checking my new source carefully.
- sgt101 3y ago
  I like to think that it was this thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_hat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_hat Maybe some ancient folk memory!!
- duped 3y ago
  It's probably a mix of sources. Famously, Goya's Witches Flight (0) shows the three witches wearing the same hat decorated with flames that Inquisitors forced their victims to wear (1) (2) (the flames showing they were to be burned for not repenting). (0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witches%27_Flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witches%27_Flight (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capirote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capirote (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanbenito https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanbenito
cardanome 3y ago
> “Ale was virtually the sole liquid consumed by medieval peasants,” writes Judith M. Bennett in a chapter in the edited volume, Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe. “Water was considered to be unhealthy, [so] each household required a large and steady supply of this perishable item.” This myth again? You don't even need to know medieval history to figure out it is bullshit. Think about it logically, you can not brew bear from water that is contaminated in the first place. Garbage in garbage out. If you have a safe water source, well just drink water. Also, we are talking about medieval beer with maybe 2 percent alcohol, how the hell is that going to help? That percentage is way too low to do any good. Obviously people were mostly drinking water. I mean think of all the calories, the logistics and all. It is true though that households would brew their own bear for consumption. Export of bear would develop in the late medieval period. It is also true, that weak 2% ale was consumed a lot, just not as much a water. I guess people just really like the idea of medieval people being shitfaced all the time. Edd: Also most places where not very densely populated, even cities were not compared to modern time. So while water safety was a concern, it was not as big as one might think.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  The idea that people only drank beer because it was safe and water wasn't is a myth, yes. The idea that premodern and early modern people considered water unsafe is not, though. You can see this view all over the european primary record, and it's very clear that in many areas and for much of premodern history people preferred fermented drinks when they had access to the choice. > Think about it logically, you can not brew bear from water that is contaminated in the first place. This is also not strictly true, depending on what sort of contamination you're talking about. Heavy metal or contemporary chemical contamination won't be affected by the brewing process, but it will kill parasites for example. Bacterial contamination varies by the specifics and degree, but you may be better off having brewed it. Securing clean springs and wells was a high priority for people all through history. Brewing is part of a range of techniques and technologies that were used to varying extents when they weren't able to. "They drank beer instead of water because it was safe" is a myth but also so is "water was safe and there was no advantage to drinking beer."
globular-toast 3y ago
I find these "believe it or not, women used to do stuff" articles weird. Women still do stuff. Why is it surprising that they used to do stuff too? The article starts with "As the old sexist saw goes, “Beer is a man’s drink.”" Who even says that? I honestly have never met a single person who would say that. I even got laid at a beer festival once. Is the author perhaps betraying their own preconceptions?
- havblue 3y ago
  The mindset seems to result from careerism: that people define themselves according to the interesting and publicly recognized work that they do. In reality I suspect that people simply had no choice but to work according to their status and ability. It's just labor and there was plenty of it to go around. Why do we have to romanticize it?
NoLsAfterMid 3y ago
So—beer was certainly the primary beverage, but people still drank water without boiling it (which is, after all, rather time and energy consuming and requires a ready fire). I have ready links to provide better context, and this is literally the most hated question on /r/AskHistorians, so I'm sure you could get rapid replies for follow-up questions. It's an extremely useful resource to tap into to get a professional historian with training in historiography to weigh in on arbitrary questions. On the general claim of using alcohol to decontaminate water: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ol1h45/deleted_by_user/h5bjn7s/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ol1h45/delet... On use of aqueducts in Britain to transport potable water: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/mnlf9n/when_the_romans_left_england_and_left_behind/gtyhsly/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/mnlf9n/when_... On general access to fresh water: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1svj1q/how_did_people_esp_european_townsmen_get_fresh/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1svj1q/how_d... On understanding of germ theory in water: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/676bg6/before_germ_theory_had_anyone_realized_that/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/676bg6/befor... On poisoning wells: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6qljlt/when_people_poisoned_wells_in_ancient_times_did/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6qljlt/when_... 2nd one on poisoning wells: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6kt7nh/poisoning_wells_is_a_common_espionage_activity_in/djp89j5/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6kt7nh/poiso... Addressing beer directly: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bewpo/what_factors_made_beer_so_important_to_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bewpo/what_...
ianburrell 3y ago
The article misses that in the period, ale and beer were different drinks. Ale was made with herbs. Hops, and the word beer, came later. The 14th century is about when hops and word beer starting taking over in England. I can't find evidence but I wouldn't be surprised if beer was brewed by men.

105 points by beardyw 3y ago

thriftwy 3y ago

...in a 500 mile radius blurb around Blue Banana.

DeathArrow 3y ago

I'm sure men dominated the field of beer drinking.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago

The link makes the claim that only small ale was drunk in medieval times because water was considered unhealthy, but I thought that was an urban myth? From the depiction of the home as the woman’s sphere in medieval Northern European literature, it isn’t surprising that brewing was women’s work along with cooking in general.

tgv 3y ago
https://history.howstuffworks.com/medieval-people-drink-beer-water.htm https://history.howstuffworks.com/medieval-people-drink-beer... https://gizmodo.com/no-medieval-people-didnt-drink-booze-to-avoid-dirty-w-1533442326 https://gizmodo.com/no-medieval-people-didnt-drink-booze-to-... No idea what the concensus is, but it also doesn't make sense that everyone drank beer instead of water. Young children almost certainly didn't drink beer. And I expect it to have been out of reach for large parts of the population: cost and availability of ingredients.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  I specifically said small beer, and that is something that has been commonly served to children in various places even into modern times. Your claim that beer was too costly also seems to be based on how beer is made and sold today: back then, beer was made without hops, and grain was available to medieval peasants because they were growing it themselves. A sort of beer was drunk by the working classes in Ancient Egypt, it has never been an elite drink.
  - User23 3y ago
    Many people don’t realize that yeast leavened bread is about 1% alcohol and as high as 2%. Obviously we let children eat it. Why would small beer at the same percentage be a problem?
    - elcomet 3y ago
      Alcohol evaporates when the bread cooks
      - jameshart 3y ago
        Seems like the consensus is that some remains. A lot of online sources cite a 1926 study that said bread can have ‘up to 1.9%’ alcohol content. This more recent study from 1998 suggests that 0.4-0.6% ethanol by mass is more typical: https://auventdunord.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/food-alcohol-content.pdf https://auventdunord.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/food-alco...
      - User23 3y ago
        Some of it, but not all of it or even the majority[1]. For reference some breads bake in as little as 20 minutes so a fair bit of alcohol remains. [1] https://www.isu.edu/news/2019-fall/no-worries-the-alcohol-burns-off-during-cookingbut-does-it-really.html https://www.isu.edu/news/2019-fall/no-worries-the-alcohol-bu...
    - groestl 3y ago
      And a very ripe banana can have an ABV value of 0.4%.
      - jameshart 3y ago
        That sugar in fruit gradually turns into alcohol should not be a surprise to anyone. Really ‘ripe’ grape juice can have an ABV of over 14% :)
        groestl 3y ago
- rsynnott 3y ago
  AIUI consensus is that people did drink water but also quite a lot of beer. "Young children almost certainly didn't drink beer." - wanna bet? > In his A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education, in Boarding Schools published 1797, writer Erasmus Darwin agreed that "For the drink of the more robust children water is preferable, and for the weaker ones, small beer ..."
  - mewpmewp2 3y ago
    To be honest if you are unaware of the bad effects of beer or how addiction works in general, it seems like a thing that you would get so easily addicted to. If I had a different knowledge set and easy access to beer, perhaps I would just drink it daily. Without water I imagine there are going to be massive hangovers though.
    - 7thaccount 3y ago
      I assume these beers were pretty low ABV. Addiction to alcohol probably was pretty common and perhaps preferable to dysentery.
      - 878654Tom 3y ago
        Yes, this is called Small Beer or Table Beer in Belgium. It goes as low as 1% and was very normal in schools and at homes before clean water was a common thing. It still is a very popular beer to drink while you eat but children don't consume it anymore. My father did tell me that when he was younger (1970-1980) they still drank it at the table in his school.
        kwhitefoot 3y ago
        I don't know when the rules changed but when I was a child in England in the sixties anything less than 2% could be sold to anyone, it wasn't regarded as properly alcoholic. The brand I remember is Top Deck Shandy, half and half lemonade and light beer.
    - 3y ago
- VoodooJuJu 3y ago
  Young children did drink it, and it's still served to children today in Finland: https://www.brewingnordic.com/farmhouse-ales/small-beer-called-kalja/ https://www.brewingnordic.com/farmhouse-ales/small-beer-call...
  - mewpmewp2 3y ago
    I somewhat remember my parents offering me a drink to try out when I was 6 or 7. Not sure if it's a made up hint of memory. It definitely wasn't something frequent or high dosage though. I actively started drinking with peers around the age of 12 - 14. That was in secrecy from parents though, asking homeless to buy us the goods.
    - gostsamo 3y ago
      My parents definitely offered me alcohol when I was a child. The hard alcohol was mostly to show me how it burns the throat and not to try it, while beer was bitter but okay for a sip or two to feel grownup. Alcohol also had a medicinal use in the family, though I'm not sure about the medicinal effect. After I was 14 and more, alcohol was introduced on more regular bases, but not with social pressure to drink, just was available as an option. Decades later, I'm just a social drinker.
      - kwhitefoot 3y ago
        I had essentially the same experience. I'm 67 now. My grandmother used to give me a miniature of De Kuyper's Cherry Brandy for Christmas from when I was six or seven, I made it last until after New Year!
- tokai 3y ago
  What a peak HN comment - authoritative and wrong. Kids most definitely did drink alcohol. https://web.archive.org/web/20110306073320/http://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09AR/09ara431.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20110306073320/http://digital.li...
  - tengbretson 3y ago
    What was the authoritative part?
    - beastman82 3y ago
      This. The irony is too much
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      I assume the GP was chuckling at how the OP offered two authoritative (well, not really) links to support a claim in my top-level post, but then went on to make an erroneous claim himself.
      - tokai 3y ago
        No not at all. Its is true and well documented claim that people didn't drink alcohol at all times instead of water. The links and what he is claiming is not overlapping.
    - tokai 3y ago
      >certainly didn't drink beer >out of reach for large parts of the population Claims that the poster base on nothing at all, but still claim it in a peremptory fashion.
      - tengbretson 3y ago
- CalRobert 3y ago
  And yet there are people alive today who enjoyed a glass of wine as a schoolchild in France. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/french-children-wine-at-school/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/french-children-wine-at-sc...
dmurray 3y ago
> it isn’t surprising that brewing was women’s work along with cooking in general. What's interesting here is precisely that brewing beer was a domestic job (and therefore women's work), in a way that baking bread, for example, was not. > most villages depended on local bakers to prepare bread ... Most households alternated between making their own ale and buying from and selling to neighbors
- ecshafer 3y ago
  From my understanding, ovens were often large communal or commercial ovens in the middle ages and renaissance periods. The poor wouldn't have had an oven in their home.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Tanoc 3y ago
    Very much so. Most homes would have had either a fire pit or a hearth. It was too resource intensive to design something just for cooking when you could also use it for heat, light, and warding off bugs.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- globular-toast 3y ago
  > in a way that baking bread, for example, was not. This probably just comes down to availability of equipment. Bread making in the home has been common in places like England and India for a long time. In places like Austria and France the preference is for bread that is best from special ovens that people don't have at home, but even there people would make things like brioche at home.
  - Scaevolus 3y ago
    Baking in large ovens has massive, obvious economies of scale in terms of fuel use per gram of bread. It's very natural to become centralized. Brewing is more efficient in terms of labor as you scale up to larger containers, but it's less extreme.

verisimi 3y ago

[flagged]

tiahura 3y ago

I had a little wife, the prettiest ever seen, She washed all the dishes and kept the house clean. She went to the mill to fetch me some flour, She brought it home in less than an hour. She baked me my bread, she brewed me my beer, She sat by the fire and made good cheer.

ConfusedDog 3y ago
I had a little wife, and I am in jail. She didn't know how to cook, nor did any chores. She went to the nail salon, and brought a new fellow. She took my house, I drank in sorrow.

CalRobert 3y ago

And we have them to thank for witches' hats! """ They wore the tall, pointy hats so that their customers could see them in the crowded marketplace. They transported their brew in cauldrons. And those who sold their beer out of stores had cats not as demon familiars, but to keep mice away from the grain. Some argue that iconography we associate with witches, from the pointy hat to the cauldron, originated from women working as master brewers. """ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/women-used-dominate-beer-industry-until-witch-accusations-started-pouring-180977171/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/women-used-dominate-b...

felideon 3y ago
Or not... see the editor's note.
- CalRobert 3y ago
  Well that's what I get for remembering a thing I read a few years back, googling for a source, and then not checking my new source carefully.
sgt101 3y ago
I like to think that it was this thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_hat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_hat Maybe some ancient folk memory!!
duped 3y ago
It's probably a mix of sources. Famously, Goya's Witches Flight (0) shows the three witches wearing the same hat decorated with flames that Inquisitors forced their victims to wear (1) (2) (the flames showing they were to be burned for not repenting). (0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witches%27_Flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witches%27_Flight (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capirote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capirote (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanbenito https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanbenito

cardanome 3y ago

> “Ale was virtually the sole liquid consumed by medieval peasants,” writes Judith M. Bennett in a chapter in the edited volume, Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe. “Water was considered to be unhealthy, [so] each household required a large and steady supply of this perishable item.” This myth again? You don't even need to know medieval history to figure out it is bullshit. Think about it logically, you can not brew bear from water that is contaminated in the first place. Garbage in garbage out. If you have a safe water source, well just drink water. Also, we are talking about medieval beer with maybe 2 percent alcohol, how the hell is that going to help? That percentage is way too low to do any good. Obviously people were mostly drinking water. I mean think of all the calories, the logistics and all. It is true though that households would brew their own bear for consumption. Export of bear would develop in the late medieval period. It is also true, that weak 2% ale was consumed a lot, just not as much a water. I guess people just really like the idea of medieval people being shitfaced all the time. Edd: Also most places where not very densely populated, even cities were not compared to modern time. So while water safety was a concern, it was not as big as one might think.

giraffe_lady 3y ago
The idea that people only drank beer because it was safe and water wasn't is a myth, yes. The idea that premodern and early modern people considered water unsafe is not, though. You can see this view all over the european primary record, and it's very clear that in many areas and for much of premodern history people preferred fermented drinks when they had access to the choice. > Think about it logically, you can not brew bear from water that is contaminated in the first place. This is also not strictly true, depending on what sort of contamination you're talking about. Heavy metal or contemporary chemical contamination won't be affected by the brewing process, but it will kill parasites for example. Bacterial contamination varies by the specifics and degree, but you may be better off having brewed it. Securing clean springs and wells was a high priority for people all through history. Brewing is part of a range of techniques and technologies that were used to varying extents when they weren't able to. "They drank beer instead of water because it was safe" is a myth but also so is "water was safe and there was no advantage to drinking beer."

globular-toast 3y ago

I find these "believe it or not, women used to do stuff" articles weird. Women still do stuff. Why is it surprising that they used to do stuff too? The article starts with "As the old sexist saw goes, “Beer is a man’s drink.”" Who even says that? I honestly have never met a single person who would say that. I even got laid at a beer festival once. Is the author perhaps betraying their own preconceptions?

havblue 3y ago
The mindset seems to result from careerism: that people define themselves according to the interesting and publicly recognized work that they do. In reality I suspect that people simply had no choice but to work according to their status and ability. It's just labor and there was plenty of it to go around. Why do we have to romanticize it?

NoLsAfterMid 3y ago

So—beer was certainly the primary beverage, but people still drank water without boiling it (which is, after all, rather time and energy consuming and requires a ready fire). I have ready links to provide better context, and this is literally the most hated question on /r/AskHistorians, so I'm sure you could get rapid replies for follow-up questions. It's an extremely useful resource to tap into to get a professional historian with training in historiography to weigh in on arbitrary questions. On the general claim of using alcohol to decontaminate water: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ol1h45/deleted_by_user/h5bjn7s/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ol1h45/delet... On use of aqueducts in Britain to transport potable water: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/mnlf9n/when_the_romans_left_england_and_left_behind/gtyhsly/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/mnlf9n/when_... On general access to fresh water: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1svj1q/how_did_people_esp_european_townsmen_get_fresh/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1svj1q/how_d... On understanding of germ theory in water: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/676bg6/before_germ_theory_had_anyone_realized_that/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/676bg6/befor... On poisoning wells: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6qljlt/when_people_poisoned_wells_in_ancient_times_did/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6qljlt/when_... 2nd one on poisoning wells: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6kt7nh/poisoning_wells_is_a_common_espionage_activity_in/djp89j5/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6kt7nh/poiso... Addressing beer directly: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bewpo/what_factors_made_beer_so_important_to_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bewpo/what_...

ianburrell 3y ago

The article misses that in the period, ale and beer were different drinks. Ale was made with herbs. Hops, and the word beer, came later. The 14th century is about when hops and word beer starting taking over in England. I can't find evidence but I wouldn't be surprised if beer was brewed by men.