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> “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

> “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."
- cardanome 3y ago
  No one is saying water was always safe, you are making a straw man so you can do a both sides thing. People where obviously worried about water safety, yes. Fermented drinks are not guaranteed to be safe though. The 2% isn't going to do much. The brewing process helps a bit but you you can just boil water after all. The question is not whether water safety was a concern, it certainly was but whether people brew beer MAINLY for safety reasons. I think it is safe(!) to assume they brew beer because they liked drinking bear.
  - mellinoe 3y ago
    > The brewing process helps a bit but you you can just boil water after all. Was this widely known?
    - lupusreal 3y ago
      No, not before Louis Pasteur. It's likely that people knew brewed beverages were safer but didn't know why, and didn't know they could skip most of the brewing process and simply boil the water.
    - cardanome 3y ago
      They didn't knew about bacteria and wouldn't have had the theory to explain why it would help. Boiling water wasn't really that necessary because the medieval period was sparsely populated and people had access to safe water sources. I am sure they would have figured out boiling water if their survival dependent on it. We know that People generally knew about basic hygiene and applied it even if they lacked modern theory.
      - dragontamer 3y ago
        > They didn't knew about bacteria and wouldn't have had the theory to explain why it would help. That didn't stop say, the sterilization effects of silver from being widely known and spread across myths. Fewer people got sick when they drank from silver cups and silver stuff. They didn't know a thing about bacteria, but enough people drinking from enough different cups and suddenly a pattern emerges that forms the basis of a myth or legend. > We know that People generally knew about basic hygiene and applied it even if they lacked modern theory. Soap and its effects to destroy common pathogens (viruses and bacteria) wasn't known... but "Hygiene" became a thing as early as 400BC Roman periods because of similar patterns. The theories we have today summarize centuries or millennia of collective experience. Not the other way around. We don't need to understand bacteria to discover how useful soap, boiling, or silver/anti-bacterial surfaces are. Instead, we use our knowledge of "silver prevents sickness", "soap prevents sickness", and "boiling prevents sickness" to help us discover a grand theory of microorganisms / bacteria.
MathMonkeyMan 3y ago
> Think about it logically, you can not brew bear from water that is contaminated in the first place. My assumption is that the contamination is biological, which would be fixed by the long boil required in brewing. Even with resistance to the local microflora, water was probably more likely to cause disease than a boiled derivative like beer. > I guess people just really like the idea of medieval people being shitfaced all the time. I've heard that the beer made then, maybe especially for consumption by peasants, had a low ABV by today's standards. High alcohol beer is a waste of grain if the goal is a slightly-more-antiseptic-than-water beverage.
- cardanome 3y ago
  > I've heard that the beer made then, maybe especially for consumption by peasants, had a low ABV by today's standards. High alcohol beer is a waste of grain if the goal is a slightly-more-antiseptic-than-water beverage. You might want to reread what I wrote, yes it was only like 2 percent. The problem is, how anti-septic is 2% beer? It is not. It doesn't really help in any meaningful way. If you want stable beer that you can transport over longer distances you want higher alcohol concentration but then again higher alcohol concentration isn't exactly great for keeping people hydrated.
  - triceratops 3y ago
    > The problem is, how anti-septic is 2% beer? It feels like you're deliberately not reading or addressing all the answers telling you that boiling water to make beer is what made it safe.
    - qwytw 3y ago
      Well if alcohol itself is irrelevant why did they not simply boil the water before drinking it without making a beer from it? I think the fact that people just like to drink beer is a much better explanation of why did they drink so much of it. The "safer to drink" part was secondary at best.
      - 3y ago
kevinmchugh 3y ago
Beer is boiled, which destroys most pathogens you might worry about. You could boil plain water and be safe, but that wasn't understood until later, see pasteurization. A vessel inoculated with yeast and other brewing microorganisms will make it harder for other microorganisms to take root. They'll be outcompeted by the large existing population. So a barrel of beer will tend to stay healthier than a barrel of water. If someone drank say, 100oz of 2% abv beer over the course of the day, that's equivalent to 2.5 pints of 5% beer - hardly enough to get shitfaced. Edit in response to your edit: density was lower but technology to manage density was less sophisticated as well. Providing clean water to a large population is a hard problem that people have had to solve lots of ways, and brewing is one of the solutions. Later, an infected city water pump led to the invention of modern epidemiology.
- dhritzkiv 3y ago
  In addition, if hops (or other herbs) were used in the boil, the acids from the hops (what gives beer its bitter bite), even in small amounts, would provide anti-bacterial benefits to the beer.
  - sudobash1 3y ago
    For the medieval period, it would have been other herbs. Hops are something of a later addition. I don't believe that they came into very widespread use until the reformation era.
- automatic6131 3y ago
  And at about 0.5% ABV you digest the alcohol at about the rate you can drink it (assuming you drink it at anything below a "competitive" rate. Just like, as much as you'd drink socially, or with a meal, or for rehydration)
- qwytw 3y ago
  > You could boil plain water and be safe, but that wasn't understood until later Not sure that's true. We have evidence that ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans (and I assume other societies) understood that boiling water made it safer to drink. Basic sand/gravel filters. Hypocrates for instance described a method of boiling water and then filtering it through a cloth to purify it and remove "bad smells". To be fair even if you have no clue about bacteria it's not a particularly complex concept to understand. If for instance pre modern people truly drank beer because it was safer surely at some point one of them would've asked the question why is that the case?
slabity 3y ago
> This myth again? You don't even need to know medieval history to figure out it is bullshit. I hate to be that guy, but do you have a source that backs this claim? "Think about it logically" doesn't really cut it.
- cardanome 3y ago
  This is a good starting point with some good sources linked: https://leslefts.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-great-medieval-water-myth.html https://leslefts.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-great-medieval-wat... By the way, this is the mainstream position among historians, it is only pop culture that hung up on the water myth.
  - sophacles 3y ago
    A significant portion of the examples in that link follow the form: This person is so holy that they drink water. The very fact that it was a sign of unusual holiness to drink water seems to undermine the point. It's like saying "in the 2020s people mostly didn't use cell phones. Look at this passage about a group called the Amish, see what I mean?".
sophacles 3y ago
I don't think you're actually applying logic. Your priors make exactly no sense. As others have pointed out - boiling contaminated water decontaminates it... beer involves boiling. 2% alcohol content is plenty to help slow bacterial growth, making it keep longer. > I mean think of all the calories, the logistics and all Ok let's do that. In the pre-modern eras, calories were the thing almost everyone was focused on. Famine was common (famine is when lots of people starve to death), so any way of getting calories was good. Beer is made of malt, that is sprouted grain that is then heated to dry and cook it. Sprouted grain doesn't keep - it either becomes a plant or rots. Using it for beer makes good use of calories that would otherwise go to waste. NO one was worried about getting fat (in fact if you were lucky enough to get fat, it was a benefit - you're more likely to survie the next famine). > Obviously people were mostly drinking water... It is also true, that weak 2% ale was consumed a lot, just not as much a water. This is not obvious at all - do you have any good sources besides weak logic based on false assumptions?
MisterTea 3y ago
> Think about it logically, you can not brew bear from water that is contaminated in the first place. I mean it's quite obvious you cannot brew an ursine creature from just water alone.
- triceratops 3y ago
  Bears are 75% water so it'll get you most of the way there.
imbnwa 3y ago
>I guess people just really like the idea of medieval people being shitfaced all the time. Dunno about medieval people being shitfaced, but it probably followed from the fact that in early America drinking was absolutely a problem. The Whiskey Tax was heavily backed by religious reformers as a de facto 'sin tax' cause there was so much drinking going on. The Prohibition/Temperance movement was about a hundred years old when it finally won legal prohibition in 1920. These weren't just neurotic Christian fundamentalists being annoying, average people were drinking around three and a half gallons of alcohol a year, and we're talking whiskey and rum here.[0] [0]https://daily.jstor.org/a-brief-history-of-drinking-alcohol/ https://daily.jstor.org/a-brief-history-of-drinking-alcohol/
- rurp 3y ago
  Is drinking 3.5 gallons of whiskey or rum per year that big of a societal problem? That's only a little more than 1 oz per day. If someone is drinking to the point of disfunction I would expect their consumption to be a great deal more than that.
  - KptMarchewa 3y ago
    First, it's amongst all people - so toddlers, kids and non- drinkers too. Second, it's pure alcohol count. Not 3,5 gallons of whisky, but so much whisky that there was 3,5 gallons of pure alcohol in it.
    - rpmisms 3y ago
      That's absolutely insane. Too bad prohibition created organized crime and gun control in the US.
triceratops 3y ago
> I guess people just really like the idea of medieval people being shitfaced all the time. That seems unlikely on 2% beer while doing hard manual labor.
neaden 3y ago
This isn't just wrong because of the beer thing, but people also drank a variety of herbal teas and other drinks, the most popular being a boiled barley drink. Just like now people prefer drinking something with more flavor then water.

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."

cardanome 3y ago
No one is saying water was always safe, you are making a straw man so you can do a both sides thing. People where obviously worried about water safety, yes. Fermented drinks are not guaranteed to be safe though. The 2% isn't going to do much. The brewing process helps a bit but you you can just boil water after all. The question is not whether water safety was a concern, it certainly was but whether people brew beer MAINLY for safety reasons. I think it is safe(!) to assume they brew beer because they liked drinking bear.
- mellinoe 3y ago
  > The brewing process helps a bit but you you can just boil water after all. Was this widely known?
  - lupusreal 3y ago
    No, not before Louis Pasteur. It's likely that people knew brewed beverages were safer but didn't know why, and didn't know they could skip most of the brewing process and simply boil the water.
  - cardanome 3y ago
    They didn't knew about bacteria and wouldn't have had the theory to explain why it would help. Boiling water wasn't really that necessary because the medieval period was sparsely populated and people had access to safe water sources. I am sure they would have figured out boiling water if their survival dependent on it. We know that People generally knew about basic hygiene and applied it even if they lacked modern theory.
    - dragontamer 3y ago
      > They didn't knew about bacteria and wouldn't have had the theory to explain why it would help. That didn't stop say, the sterilization effects of silver from being widely known and spread across myths. Fewer people got sick when they drank from silver cups and silver stuff. They didn't know a thing about bacteria, but enough people drinking from enough different cups and suddenly a pattern emerges that forms the basis of a myth or legend. > We know that People generally knew about basic hygiene and applied it even if they lacked modern theory. Soap and its effects to destroy common pathogens (viruses and bacteria) wasn't known... but "Hygiene" became a thing as early as 400BC Roman periods because of similar patterns. The theories we have today summarize centuries or millennia of collective experience. Not the other way around. We don't need to understand bacteria to discover how useful soap, boiling, or silver/anti-bacterial surfaces are. Instead, we use our knowledge of "silver prevents sickness", "soap prevents sickness", and "boiling prevents sickness" to help us discover a grand theory of microorganisms / bacteria.

MathMonkeyMan 3y ago

> Think about it logically, you can not brew bear from water that is contaminated in the first place. My assumption is that the contamination is biological, which would be fixed by the long boil required in brewing. Even with resistance to the local microflora, water was probably more likely to cause disease than a boiled derivative like beer. > I guess people just really like the idea of medieval people being shitfaced all the time. I've heard that the beer made then, maybe especially for consumption by peasants, had a low ABV by today's standards. High alcohol beer is a waste of grain if the goal is a slightly-more-antiseptic-than-water beverage.

cardanome 3y ago
> I've heard that the beer made then, maybe especially for consumption by peasants, had a low ABV by today's standards. High alcohol beer is a waste of grain if the goal is a slightly-more-antiseptic-than-water beverage. You might want to reread what I wrote, yes it was only like 2 percent. The problem is, how anti-septic is 2% beer? It is not. It doesn't really help in any meaningful way. If you want stable beer that you can transport over longer distances you want higher alcohol concentration but then again higher alcohol concentration isn't exactly great for keeping people hydrated.
- triceratops 3y ago
  > The problem is, how anti-septic is 2% beer? It feels like you're deliberately not reading or addressing all the answers telling you that boiling water to make beer is what made it safe.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    Well if alcohol itself is irrelevant why did they not simply boil the water before drinking it without making a beer from it? I think the fact that people just like to drink beer is a much better explanation of why did they drink so much of it. The "safer to drink" part was secondary at best.
    - 3y ago

kevinmchugh 3y ago

Beer is boiled, which destroys most pathogens you might worry about. You could boil plain water and be safe, but that wasn't understood until later, see pasteurization. A vessel inoculated with yeast and other brewing microorganisms will make it harder for other microorganisms to take root. They'll be outcompeted by the large existing population. So a barrel of beer will tend to stay healthier than a barrel of water. If someone drank say, 100oz of 2% abv beer over the course of the day, that's equivalent to 2.5 pints of 5% beer - hardly enough to get shitfaced. Edit in response to your edit: density was lower but technology to manage density was less sophisticated as well. Providing clean water to a large population is a hard problem that people have had to solve lots of ways, and brewing is one of the solutions. Later, an infected city water pump led to the invention of modern epidemiology.

dhritzkiv 3y ago
In addition, if hops (or other herbs) were used in the boil, the acids from the hops (what gives beer its bitter bite), even in small amounts, would provide anti-bacterial benefits to the beer.
- sudobash1 3y ago
  For the medieval period, it would have been other herbs. Hops are something of a later addition. I don't believe that they came into very widespread use until the reformation era.
automatic6131 3y ago
And at about 0.5% ABV you digest the alcohol at about the rate you can drink it (assuming you drink it at anything below a "competitive" rate. Just like, as much as you'd drink socially, or with a meal, or for rehydration)
qwytw 3y ago
> You could boil plain water and be safe, but that wasn't understood until later Not sure that's true. We have evidence that ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans (and I assume other societies) understood that boiling water made it safer to drink. Basic sand/gravel filters. Hypocrates for instance described a method of boiling water and then filtering it through a cloth to purify it and remove "bad smells". To be fair even if you have no clue about bacteria it's not a particularly complex concept to understand. If for instance pre modern people truly drank beer because it was safer surely at some point one of them would've asked the question why is that the case?

slabity 3y ago

> This myth again? You don't even need to know medieval history to figure out it is bullshit. I hate to be that guy, but do you have a source that backs this claim? "Think about it logically" doesn't really cut it.

cardanome 3y ago
This is a good starting point with some good sources linked: https://leslefts.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-great-medieval-water-myth.html https://leslefts.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-great-medieval-wat... By the way, this is the mainstream position among historians, it is only pop culture that hung up on the water myth.
- sophacles 3y ago
  A significant portion of the examples in that link follow the form: This person is so holy that they drink water. The very fact that it was a sign of unusual holiness to drink water seems to undermine the point. It's like saying "in the 2020s people mostly didn't use cell phones. Look at this passage about a group called the Amish, see what I mean?".

sophacles 3y ago

I don't think you're actually applying logic. Your priors make exactly no sense. As others have pointed out - boiling contaminated water decontaminates it... beer involves boiling. 2% alcohol content is plenty to help slow bacterial growth, making it keep longer. > I mean think of all the calories, the logistics and all Ok let's do that. In the pre-modern eras, calories were the thing almost everyone was focused on. Famine was common (famine is when lots of people starve to death), so any way of getting calories was good. Beer is made of malt, that is sprouted grain that is then heated to dry and cook it. Sprouted grain doesn't keep - it either becomes a plant or rots. Using it for beer makes good use of calories that would otherwise go to waste. NO one was worried about getting fat (in fact if you were lucky enough to get fat, it was a benefit - you're more likely to survie the next famine). > Obviously people were mostly drinking water... It is also true, that weak 2% ale was consumed a lot, just not as much a water. This is not obvious at all - do you have any good sources besides weak logic based on false assumptions?

MisterTea 3y ago

> Think about it logically, you can not brew bear from water that is contaminated in the first place. I mean it's quite obvious you cannot brew an ursine creature from just water alone.

triceratops 3y ago
Bears are 75% water so it'll get you most of the way there.

imbnwa 3y ago

>I guess people just really like the idea of medieval people being shitfaced all the time. Dunno about medieval people being shitfaced, but it probably followed from the fact that in early America drinking was absolutely a problem. The Whiskey Tax was heavily backed by religious reformers as a de facto 'sin tax' cause there was so much drinking going on. The Prohibition/Temperance movement was about a hundred years old when it finally won legal prohibition in 1920. These weren't just neurotic Christian fundamentalists being annoying, average people were drinking around three and a half gallons of alcohol a year, and we're talking whiskey and rum here.[0] [0]https://daily.jstor.org/a-brief-history-of-drinking-alcohol/ https://daily.jstor.org/a-brief-history-of-drinking-alcohol/

rurp 3y ago
Is drinking 3.5 gallons of whiskey or rum per year that big of a societal problem? That's only a little more than 1 oz per day. If someone is drinking to the point of disfunction I would expect their consumption to be a great deal more than that.
- KptMarchewa 3y ago
  First, it's amongst all people - so toddlers, kids and non- drinkers too. Second, it's pure alcohol count. Not 3,5 gallons of whisky, but so much whisky that there was 3,5 gallons of pure alcohol in it.
  - rpmisms 3y ago
    That's absolutely insane. Too bad prohibition created organized crime and gun control in the US.

triceratops 3y ago

> I guess people just really like the idea of medieval people being shitfaced all the time. That seems unlikely on 2% beer while doing hard manual labor.

neaden 3y ago

This isn't just wrong because of the beer thing, but people also drank a variety of herbal teas and other drinks, the most popular being a boiled barley drink. Just like now people prefer drinking something with more flavor then water.