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I think it’s important to point out that almost everyone drank beer and it wasn’t because the water was bad. It was because they liked drinking beer. Our moder

I think it’s important to point out that almost everyone drank beer and it wasn’t because the water was bad. It was because they liked drinking beer. Our modern culture doesn’t like the idea of people drinking beer all day so there has to be some scientific justification to make it acceptable to modern sensibilities. The percentage of alcohol required to preserve beer for long periods is too high for sailors to be drinking a gallon of it per day.

jfforko4 1y ago
"Beer" had like 1% of alcohol content. Just enough to keep it without bacteria. Drinking 2 month old stale untreated water... good luck with that. > they liked drinking beer Sailors were basically slaves. Nobody cared what they liked. But if crew dies from diarrhia, that is a big problem!
- oofManBang 1y ago
  > Just enough to keep it without bacteria. Bacteria (and certainly viruses) can survive 80 proof liquor. 1% alcohol is going to have very little sterilization effect.
  - xorcist 1y ago
    It's not the alcohol that's supposed to kill bacteria, it's the long boil.
    - oofManBang 1y ago
      The boil does kill the bacteria, but it's not preserved after the boil. At best it's as sterile as water; at worse it spoils faster due to the abundance of nutrients.
      - xorcist 1y ago
        That's why it's kept sealed, under pressure. I wouldn't fill a water bottle and let it sit for many months before drinking it ever today. A beer bottle with CO2 atmosphere can sit for a long time. There may be other reasons to prefer beer where the alcohol is relevant of course, just not for freshness. And freshness could absolutely have been relevant in the choice of drinks to load, together with low cost and acceptance in general.
        wqaatwt 1y ago
        Sealing liquids user pressure on a large scale wasn’t really feasible back in those days though. They were just generally kept in wooden barrels.
        larsga 1y ago
        Wooden barrels were sealed and could handle high pressure. The trouble is that (long story) it was very difficult to get a precise amount of pressure, so people generally didn't even try. There are videos online of cases where people have failed and end up battling a beer barrel spraying beer like a firehose.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        oofManBang 1y ago
        Would technology that allows sealing of beer not apply even better to relatively nutrition-less water? Especially boiled water. Anything that can feed off of pottery + water or metal + water or glass + water is gonna take a lot longer to grow than basically any kind of familiar bacteria feeding off beer + any of the above. > There may be other reasons to prefer beer where the alcohol is relevant of course I imagine these are largely the same reasons people drink beer today. Spoiler: it generally ain't hydration or avoidance of disease.
        bohrbohra 1y ago
        > relatively nutrition-less water That's what I was thinking. Why would boiled water kept hermetically sealed in a glass bottle for a year go bad ?
    - larsga 1y ago
      First of all, many types of beer were historically not boiled. Quite a few still aren't. The mash, however, pasteurizes the beer. That, however, doesn't last forever. In the conditions of the 18th century or whatever, microorganisms will get into the beer after mashing/boiling, so the heat treatment only helps for a while. The fermentation really does protect the beer afterwards, but it's a combination of low pH, alcohol, low oxygen, little nutrients, CO2, etc. Hops also help against gram-positive bacteria.
      - wqaatwt 1y ago
        Hops weren’t that popular until the 1400-1500s (or not used at all in some places like England) though
        larsga 1y ago
        You're broadly right, but they were popular for most of the period we're discussing. In continental Europe they were popular from roughly ~1000 onwards (see Behre 1999), in England from roughly 1500 onwards. In African and South American farmhouse brewing they're still not used. So it's a pretty complicated picture. As the comment made clear, hops are only one component of what makes beer safe, though. Storable, safe beer for travel is documented already in Ancient Egypt.
    - wqaatwt 1y ago
      Yes and ancient Greeks and Romans already knew that boiling water somehow makes it safer to drink. Yet people continued wasting resources on time on making beer and similar drinks due to whatever reasons..
- qwytw 1y ago
  > Beer" had like 1% of alcohol content. How is that enough? A highly nutritious liquid made from grain is a quite perfect environment for all kind of bacteria and other stuff to grow and spread. Relatively clean water? Not so much.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    start with pasturization, then add hops. Beer will go bad but not fast-
    - wqaatwt 1y ago
      Right.. yet most beer in the middle ages was not hopped. In some areas like Britain it was virtually unknown and throughout most of Europe it didn’t become popular until the 1500s or so. Sure, IPA can last for a very long time (that was kind of the point) most people didn’t drink that type of beer on a daily basis.
      - bluGill 1y ago
        The age of sail didn't start until after 1500
- s1artibartfast 1y ago
  Some sailors were basically slaves, but like most slaves, they required a minimum to prevent revolt, especially at sea where they vastly outnumbered commanding officers and there was no reinforcement.
- kayodelycaon 1y ago
  > "Beer" had like 1% of alcohol content. Just enough to keep it without bacteria. You need closer to 40% alcohol. > Nobody cared what they liked. Not in the British Navy. Food was very important to morale and they got a lot of it with the best quality they could manage. Meat every day was luxury few people could afford. Mutiny was a very real risk. That's why warships carried so many marines. Good food goes a long way to preventing this.
- larsga 1y ago
  > "Beer" had like 1% of alcohol content. Beer has had a huge range of alcohol strengths, from Mesopotamia until today, so that statement is nonsensical. > Just enough to keep it without bacteria. 1% is not enough to keep bacteria from growing in a beer. In general, more alcohol means it will keep longer, but to be truly safe you need to go quite high. This is a pretty complex issue, though.
bluGill 1y ago
Beer was known to go bad on long voyages. So long as the beer held out though there was no scurvy.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
  Beer staying fresh seems like a proxy for voyage duration. Longer trips means more likely to have run out of beer/vitamin C sources. No beer probably means no dock where sailors could have consumed anything other than highly preserved food.
- larsga 1y ago
  Beer does not cure scurvy. Scurvy is caused by a lack of vitamin C, which is not in beer.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    The article makes the clear claim that while there was beer on board there was no Scurvy. Is the article wrong? Does beer have vitamin C? Does beer have something else that also cures Scurvy? Does beer running out also coincide with someone else running out that cures scurvy? Does beer running out also coincide with the body's natural ability to coast on no vitamin C? Is there something else in play that I can't think of? I'm not qualified to answer that. I do know enough history to believe that the article was written be an expert in the age of sail and so I am inclined to believe claims that I didn't already know are facts. You comment reads like someone took the simplified 4th grade history and repeating a fact out of context - and so I'm inclined to believe you are wrong in some way, but that is only my guess. If you (or someone else) can cite better evidence I will change my mind, for now I'm sticking with my comment as correct.
    - allturtles 1y ago
      > Is the article wrong? Yes. Or more to the point, it is uncritically repeating the medical theories of its eighteenth-century sources, which were wrong. See also [0], [1]. People had a really hard time figuring out how to stop scurvy, and the use of citrus as a remedy was not generally accepted until well into the nineteenth century. > Does beer have vitamin C? No. > Does beer have something else that also cures Scurvy No. Scurvy is vitamin-C deficiency. [0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12810402/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12810402/ [1]: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2011/04/the-budweiser-diet-how-long-can-you-survive-on-beer-alone.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2011/04/the-budweiser-di...
oofManBang 1y ago
Anyone downvoting this comment is not understanding how common this myth is, or not bothering to google to verify their own understanding. It's by far the most asked-about myth on /r/askhistorians. Someone asked this under 24 hours ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k5ji8i/how_wellhydrated_were_people_historically/moiphp0/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k5ji8i/how_... But it comes up a good 2-5x a month. I really want to know where this understanding came from.
- larsga 1y ago
  The thing is that water was not really safe to drink, no matter what these people may tell you. There's a reason there are huge aid campaigns all over the Third World to ensure people have access to safe water. Some water is relatively safe to drink, but even in the wild you can get giardasis and other problems from drinking it. The more human beings are nearby, the more of an issue it becomes. In the time before cars transporting water was not easy, so people usually had to get water from the nearest source. Wells were not necessarily safe, especially because both humans and animals tended to shit pretty much everywhere. Even today well water is not necessarily safe. But did people know that drinking water was unsafe? Evidence on that is contradictory. They were certainly aware that some kinds of water was safer than others. And was this why people drank beer instead? Not clear at all. It's completely possible they did it simply because they wanted to, although it was seen as healthy. That was because of the calories, though. In many places they did not drink beer, however. Scotland and Norway drank blaand (a whey drink), and Eastern Europe drank a lot of kvass. Fermented birch sap and a drink from juniper berries were common, too. Not to mention a weird drink known as rostdrikke/taar/etc depending on language (takes too long to explain). What I find interesting about this is that nobody seems to care to really dive into the details and describe the situation as it actually was. I realize it's a lot of work, but still.
  - oofManBang 1y ago
    I don't really get your point. Water isn't necessarily safe now, either. Just like now, you boil water if you are aware of risk. Just like now, people communicated about when to boil, where to gather water, skinning people alive for messing with the water (well that has perhaps improved a little bit), militaries would regularly poison water sources. And of course, you can find people today who willingly take dumb risks for no explicable reason. All of your uncertainty applies just as much to today as it did in the past. Water has always been, is, and will be uncertain. But there's so much evidence of awareness of this that speculating people didn't drink water is absurd. Not to mention keeping water sources clean gets much harder with high populations we see today—we have roughly the same amount of water that we did before Btw, you casually ACCEPTED that people drank beer instead of water when we know this is false. Even on ships (as you would know if you clicked through the askhistorians link under the top of the thread) ships did carry (a lot of!) water—it just wasn't listed as rationed unless supplies ran low. This was both drunk directly and added to the beer to produce the gallon allocated. Ie you might follow the same rhetorical technique to say "why do you beat your wife? Well, the evidence is uncertain.", even if we have clear evidence you don't beat your wife. You'd really have to find evidence that people explicitly avoided water to make such a claim. In all situations I can think of there was either certainty it was not potable (ie seawater, poisoned well, flooding, etc) and being unable to boil it.
rdj 1y ago
A caveat being and mentioned in the article, that sailors didn't have access to the safe water of lakes and streams, thus beer. And as someone mentions below, it's safer to drink low alcohol beer than months old (untreated) water. I can see why people jump to the conclusion that beer was safer than water...and it makes for good cocktail hour small talk.
- larsga 1y ago
  > sailors didn't have access to the safe water of lakes and streams As if the water of lakes and streams was necessarily safe. Imagine drinking Thames water in the era before proper sewers. In 1858 (the Great Stink) the Thames stank so badly from feces that parts of Parliament became unusable.
  - wqaatwt 1y ago
    You’d have to go quite far upriver to avoid drinking seawater (since Thames is tidal) even before all the pollution.
sandworm101 1y ago
The alcohol wasnt what made beer safe. Beer was safer than water because to make bear one must use sterile water. So beer at least started out sterile/boiled before it went into the barrel.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- larsga 1y ago
  This is complete and utter nonsense. The water used in beer often had bacteria (and other stuff) but to brew beer you must mash, at 65C for an hour or more, which pasteurizes the beer. Hops protect the beer against bacteria, and the yeast also makes it hard for other organisms to multiply in the fermented beer. Alcohol is one of those ways, but only one.
  - circlefavshape 1y ago
    I think you misread the comment you're replying to. > The alcohol wasnt what made beer safe. Beer was safer than water because to make bear one must use sterile water. So beer at least started out sterile/boiled before it went into the barrel. AFAICS you're agreeing with this, so "complete and utter nonsense" seems a bit harsh
    - larsga 1y ago
      This was the part I was referring to: "Beer was safer than water because to make bear one must use sterile water." I agree I should have quoted that to be clearer.
  - sandworm101 1y ago
    That is modern beer, the stuff made by people who know about bacteria. Prior to modern knowledge, beer recipies were based on trial and error. Boiling the water first avoided many spoilation problems that, today, we know how to prevent through other means.
larsga 1y ago
> The percentage of alcohol required to preserve beer for long periods is too high for sailors to be drinking a gallon of it per day. Reading this thread I think the best thing would be if people were forbidden from comment on the history of beer in online forums. Nobody knows anything, yet everyone is shouting their misunderstandings from the rooftops. The Danish fleet, to take just one example, was completely dependent on a supply of "skibsøl", to the extent that the king started his own brewery to ensure his fleet had a supply. Later kings started a stupid brewing monopoly system in Copenhagen to ensure no breweries went bankrupt, again with the same aim. "Skibsøl" was a big thing in Norway and Sweden, too. The Royal Navy used to serve it, too, before switching to grog. Yes, weak beer will turn sour, but it takes a lot to make it harmful.
- SECProto 1y ago
  > Yes, weak beer will turn sour, but it takes a lot to make it harmful. While I agree in general with what you've said, this line is wrong. Strong beer will turn sour too. Acetobacter is good up to 10-15%, it's how we get malt vinegar and wine vinegar. All it needs is ethanol, oxygen, and time.
  - larsga 1y ago
    Sure. Hard to get all the details into a comment that's already too long. In general, however, strong beer keeps much longer than weak beer. However, even if it does sour, that doesn't mean it's harmful to drink.
beloch 1y ago
Ever gotten a bad case of gastroenteritis from a restaurant that made you swear never to go back and even turned you off an entire style of cuisine for, at least, a little while? A few brushes with bad water might have given folk a strong preference for beer, just to be on the safe side, even if most water was safe.
- wqaatwt 1y ago
  Yet same wouldn’t apply to stale beer that went bad after a few days or weeks?
  - larsga 1y ago
    No, it wouldn't. It's very difficult to produce beer where harmful organisms can multiply. Post-fermentation it's an extremely difficult environment for most organisms.
    - poloniculmov 1y ago
      Brewed beer can get yeast or bacterial infections, especially if you cannot refrigerate it and don't have the means to sanitize recipients.
      - larsga 1y ago
        Yes, it can. But infections by harmful organisms is very difficult to achieve. The common spoilage organisms in beer are all harmless to humans. Here's a good overview http://mmbr.asm.org/content/77/2/157.long http://mmbr.asm.org/content/77/2/157.long Just the hops alone stop pretty much all gram-positive bacteria except Lactobacillus and a few other harmless ones.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
rpmisms 1y ago
Bit of both, but good grog keeps people happy.
ludicrousdispla 1y ago
It is my understanding that the yeast in the beer will consume everything it can and that is what keeps the beer preserved, or safe to drink.
- poloniculmov 1y ago
  While yeast will consume most of the nutrients, there's still residual sugar in beer. Hops will inhibit microbial and bacterial growth, but they will not stop it completely.
  - larsga 1y ago
    Yes, there is residual sugar, but it's complex sugars that not even yeast that specializes in fermenting sugar can consume. Plus there is alpha acids from hops, as you point out, there is alcohol, pH is low, oxygen is gone, there's a CO2 blanket, etc. So it's a very, very difficult environment for microorganisms. Pretty close to none that cause disease can grow in this environment. Is it more than 99.99999999999999% safe? No. Is it vastly safer that water? Yes.
asdfman123 1y ago
Often things that a lot of people do repeatedly for "pure enjoyment" actually has some hidden benefit. Like for instance, drinking in general. People do it because it's fun, but it can play an important social bonding role.
- tomwojcik 1y ago
  Exactly. To my understanding any amount of alcohol is unhealthy, but societies have had festivals or other rituals since the beginning, and substances _like_ alcohol play an important role in those.
jillesvangurp 1y ago
Water on ships wasn't that clean to begin with. And things were made worse by people maybe not observing good hygiene. Think sharing cups, dipping those in the water, not washing their hands, etc. Imagine that, stored in a poorly sealed barrel on a ship with rats and other pests. Water was pretty bad on ships. People would get sick and weak on longer journeys (malnutrition, contaminated water, rotting food, etc.). A lot of their diseases would spread via water. Beer had a head start on water because part of the process of making it involves boiling the water and the alcohol slows the growth of most of the pathogens. And it has some nutritional value.
oofManBang 1y ago
Point of order, beer was stored in a higher alcohol percentage (which is where we get IPAs from) which does extend its shelf life significantly. The gallon was heavily watered down to serve. Which is basically identical to lite beer we drink today. Hopefully with more flavor, but I don't actually know.

jfforko4 1y ago

"Beer" had like 1% of alcohol content. Just enough to keep it without bacteria. Drinking 2 month old stale untreated water... good luck with that. > they liked drinking beer Sailors were basically slaves. Nobody cared what they liked. But if crew dies from diarrhia, that is a big problem!

oofManBang 1y ago
> Just enough to keep it without bacteria. Bacteria (and certainly viruses) can survive 80 proof liquor. 1% alcohol is going to have very little sterilization effect.
- xorcist 1y ago
  It's not the alcohol that's supposed to kill bacteria, it's the long boil.
  - oofManBang 1y ago
    The boil does kill the bacteria, but it's not preserved after the boil. At best it's as sterile as water; at worse it spoils faster due to the abundance of nutrients.
    - xorcist 1y ago
      That's why it's kept sealed, under pressure. I wouldn't fill a water bottle and let it sit for many months before drinking it ever today. A beer bottle with CO2 atmosphere can sit for a long time. There may be other reasons to prefer beer where the alcohol is relevant of course, just not for freshness. And freshness could absolutely have been relevant in the choice of drinks to load, together with low cost and acceptance in general.
      - wqaatwt 1y ago
        Sealing liquids user pressure on a large scale wasn’t really feasible back in those days though. They were just generally kept in wooden barrels.
        larsga 1y ago
        Wooden barrels were sealed and could handle high pressure. The trouble is that (long story) it was very difficult to get a precise amount of pressure, so people generally didn't even try. There are videos online of cases where people have failed and end up battling a beer barrel spraying beer like a firehose.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - oofManBang 1y ago
        Would technology that allows sealing of beer not apply even better to relatively nutrition-less water? Especially boiled water. Anything that can feed off of pottery + water or metal + water or glass + water is gonna take a lot longer to grow than basically any kind of familiar bacteria feeding off beer + any of the above. > There may be other reasons to prefer beer where the alcohol is relevant of course I imagine these are largely the same reasons people drink beer today. Spoiler: it generally ain't hydration or avoidance of disease.
        bohrbohra 1y ago
        > relatively nutrition-less water That's what I was thinking. Why would boiled water kept hermetically sealed in a glass bottle for a year go bad ?
  - larsga 1y ago
    First of all, many types of beer were historically not boiled. Quite a few still aren't. The mash, however, pasteurizes the beer. That, however, doesn't last forever. In the conditions of the 18th century or whatever, microorganisms will get into the beer after mashing/boiling, so the heat treatment only helps for a while. The fermentation really does protect the beer afterwards, but it's a combination of low pH, alcohol, low oxygen, little nutrients, CO2, etc. Hops also help against gram-positive bacteria.
    - wqaatwt 1y ago
      Hops weren’t that popular until the 1400-1500s (or not used at all in some places like England) though
      - larsga 1y ago
        You're broadly right, but they were popular for most of the period we're discussing. In continental Europe they were popular from roughly ~1000 onwards (see Behre 1999), in England from roughly 1500 onwards. In African and South American farmhouse brewing they're still not used. So it's a pretty complicated picture. As the comment made clear, hops are only one component of what makes beer safe, though. Storable, safe beer for travel is documented already in Ancient Egypt.
  - wqaatwt 1y ago
    Yes and ancient Greeks and Romans already knew that boiling water somehow makes it safer to drink. Yet people continued wasting resources on time on making beer and similar drinks due to whatever reasons..
qwytw 1y ago
> Beer" had like 1% of alcohol content. How is that enough? A highly nutritious liquid made from grain is a quite perfect environment for all kind of bacteria and other stuff to grow and spread. Relatively clean water? Not so much.
- bluGill 1y ago
  start with pasturization, then add hops. Beer will go bad but not fast-
  - wqaatwt 1y ago
    Right.. yet most beer in the middle ages was not hopped. In some areas like Britain it was virtually unknown and throughout most of Europe it didn’t become popular until the 1500s or so. Sure, IPA can last for a very long time (that was kind of the point) most people didn’t drink that type of beer on a daily basis.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      The age of sail didn't start until after 1500
s1artibartfast 1y ago
Some sailors were basically slaves, but like most slaves, they required a minimum to prevent revolt, especially at sea where they vastly outnumbered commanding officers and there was no reinforcement.
kayodelycaon 1y ago
> "Beer" had like 1% of alcohol content. Just enough to keep it without bacteria. You need closer to 40% alcohol. > Nobody cared what they liked. Not in the British Navy. Food was very important to morale and they got a lot of it with the best quality they could manage. Meat every day was luxury few people could afford. Mutiny was a very real risk. That's why warships carried so many marines. Good food goes a long way to preventing this.
larsga 1y ago
> "Beer" had like 1% of alcohol content. Beer has had a huge range of alcohol strengths, from Mesopotamia until today, so that statement is nonsensical. > Just enough to keep it without bacteria. 1% is not enough to keep bacteria from growing in a beer. In general, more alcohol means it will keep longer, but to be truly safe you need to go quite high. This is a pretty complex issue, though.

bluGill 1y ago

Beer was known to go bad on long voyages. So long as the beer held out though there was no scurvy.

0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
Beer staying fresh seems like a proxy for voyage duration. Longer trips means more likely to have run out of beer/vitamin C sources. No beer probably means no dock where sailors could have consumed anything other than highly preserved food.
larsga 1y ago
Beer does not cure scurvy. Scurvy is caused by a lack of vitamin C, which is not in beer.
- bluGill 1y ago
  The article makes the clear claim that while there was beer on board there was no Scurvy. Is the article wrong? Does beer have vitamin C? Does beer have something else that also cures Scurvy? Does beer running out also coincide with someone else running out that cures scurvy? Does beer running out also coincide with the body's natural ability to coast on no vitamin C? Is there something else in play that I can't think of? I'm not qualified to answer that. I do know enough history to believe that the article was written be an expert in the age of sail and so I am inclined to believe claims that I didn't already know are facts. You comment reads like someone took the simplified 4th grade history and repeating a fact out of context - and so I'm inclined to believe you are wrong in some way, but that is only my guess. If you (or someone else) can cite better evidence I will change my mind, for now I'm sticking with my comment as correct.
  - allturtles 1y ago
    > Is the article wrong? Yes. Or more to the point, it is uncritically repeating the medical theories of its eighteenth-century sources, which were wrong. See also [0], [1]. People had a really hard time figuring out how to stop scurvy, and the use of citrus as a remedy was not generally accepted until well into the nineteenth century. > Does beer have vitamin C? No. > Does beer have something else that also cures Scurvy No. Scurvy is vitamin-C deficiency. [0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12810402/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12810402/ [1]: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2011/04/the-budweiser-diet-how-long-can-you-survive-on-beer-alone.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2011/04/the-budweiser-di...

oofManBang 1y ago

Anyone downvoting this comment is not understanding how common this myth is, or not bothering to google to verify their own understanding. It's by far the most asked-about myth on /r/askhistorians. Someone asked this under 24 hours ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k5ji8i/how_wellhydrated_were_people_historically/moiphp0/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k5ji8i/how_... But it comes up a good 2-5x a month. I really want to know where this understanding came from.

larsga 1y ago
The thing is that water was not really safe to drink, no matter what these people may tell you. There's a reason there are huge aid campaigns all over the Third World to ensure people have access to safe water. Some water is relatively safe to drink, but even in the wild you can get giardasis and other problems from drinking it. The more human beings are nearby, the more of an issue it becomes. In the time before cars transporting water was not easy, so people usually had to get water from the nearest source. Wells were not necessarily safe, especially because both humans and animals tended to shit pretty much everywhere. Even today well water is not necessarily safe. But did people know that drinking water was unsafe? Evidence on that is contradictory. They were certainly aware that some kinds of water was safer than others. And was this why people drank beer instead? Not clear at all. It's completely possible they did it simply because they wanted to, although it was seen as healthy. That was because of the calories, though. In many places they did not drink beer, however. Scotland and Norway drank blaand (a whey drink), and Eastern Europe drank a lot of kvass. Fermented birch sap and a drink from juniper berries were common, too. Not to mention a weird drink known as rostdrikke/taar/etc depending on language (takes too long to explain). What I find interesting about this is that nobody seems to care to really dive into the details and describe the situation as it actually was. I realize it's a lot of work, but still.
- oofManBang 1y ago
  I don't really get your point. Water isn't necessarily safe now, either. Just like now, you boil water if you are aware of risk. Just like now, people communicated about when to boil, where to gather water, skinning people alive for messing with the water (well that has perhaps improved a little bit), militaries would regularly poison water sources. And of course, you can find people today who willingly take dumb risks for no explicable reason. All of your uncertainty applies just as much to today as it did in the past. Water has always been, is, and will be uncertain. But there's so much evidence of awareness of this that speculating people didn't drink water is absurd. Not to mention keeping water sources clean gets much harder with high populations we see today—we have roughly the same amount of water that we did before Btw, you casually ACCEPTED that people drank beer instead of water when we know this is false. Even on ships (as you would know if you clicked through the askhistorians link under the top of the thread) ships did carry (a lot of!) water—it just wasn't listed as rationed unless supplies ran low. This was both drunk directly and added to the beer to produce the gallon allocated. Ie you might follow the same rhetorical technique to say "why do you beat your wife? Well, the evidence is uncertain.", even if we have clear evidence you don't beat your wife. You'd really have to find evidence that people explicitly avoided water to make such a claim. In all situations I can think of there was either certainty it was not potable (ie seawater, poisoned well, flooding, etc) and being unable to boil it.

rdj 1y ago

A caveat being and mentioned in the article, that sailors didn't have access to the safe water of lakes and streams, thus beer. And as someone mentions below, it's safer to drink low alcohol beer than months old (untreated) water. I can see why people jump to the conclusion that beer was safer than water...and it makes for good cocktail hour small talk.

larsga 1y ago
> sailors didn't have access to the safe water of lakes and streams As if the water of lakes and streams was necessarily safe. Imagine drinking Thames water in the era before proper sewers. In 1858 (the Great Stink) the Thames stank so badly from feces that parts of Parliament became unusable.
- wqaatwt 1y ago
  You’d have to go quite far upriver to avoid drinking seawater (since Thames is tidal) even before all the pollution.

sandworm101 1y ago

The alcohol wasnt what made beer safe. Beer was safer than water because to make bear one must use sterile water. So beer at least started out sterile/boiled before it went into the barrel.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
larsga 1y ago
This is complete and utter nonsense. The water used in beer often had bacteria (and other stuff) but to brew beer you must mash, at 65C for an hour or more, which pasteurizes the beer. Hops protect the beer against bacteria, and the yeast also makes it hard for other organisms to multiply in the fermented beer. Alcohol is one of those ways, but only one.
- circlefavshape 1y ago
  I think you misread the comment you're replying to. > The alcohol wasnt what made beer safe. Beer was safer than water because to make bear one must use sterile water. So beer at least started out sterile/boiled before it went into the barrel. AFAICS you're agreeing with this, so "complete and utter nonsense" seems a bit harsh
  - larsga 1y ago
    This was the part I was referring to: "Beer was safer than water because to make bear one must use sterile water." I agree I should have quoted that to be clearer.
- sandworm101 1y ago
  That is modern beer, the stuff made by people who know about bacteria. Prior to modern knowledge, beer recipies were based on trial and error. Boiling the water first avoided many spoilation problems that, today, we know how to prevent through other means.

larsga 1y ago

> The percentage of alcohol required to preserve beer for long periods is too high for sailors to be drinking a gallon of it per day. Reading this thread I think the best thing would be if people were forbidden from comment on the history of beer in online forums. Nobody knows anything, yet everyone is shouting their misunderstandings from the rooftops. The Danish fleet, to take just one example, was completely dependent on a supply of "skibsøl", to the extent that the king started his own brewery to ensure his fleet had a supply. Later kings started a stupid brewing monopoly system in Copenhagen to ensure no breweries went bankrupt, again with the same aim. "Skibsøl" was a big thing in Norway and Sweden, too. The Royal Navy used to serve it, too, before switching to grog. Yes, weak beer will turn sour, but it takes a lot to make it harmful.

SECProto 1y ago
> Yes, weak beer will turn sour, but it takes a lot to make it harmful. While I agree in general with what you've said, this line is wrong. Strong beer will turn sour too. Acetobacter is good up to 10-15%, it's how we get malt vinegar and wine vinegar. All it needs is ethanol, oxygen, and time.
- larsga 1y ago
  Sure. Hard to get all the details into a comment that's already too long. In general, however, strong beer keeps much longer than weak beer. However, even if it does sour, that doesn't mean it's harmful to drink.

beloch 1y ago

Ever gotten a bad case of gastroenteritis from a restaurant that made you swear never to go back and even turned you off an entire style of cuisine for, at least, a little while? A few brushes with bad water might have given folk a strong preference for beer, just to be on the safe side, even if most water was safe.

wqaatwt 1y ago
Yet same wouldn’t apply to stale beer that went bad after a few days or weeks?
- larsga 1y ago
  No, it wouldn't. It's very difficult to produce beer where harmful organisms can multiply. Post-fermentation it's an extremely difficult environment for most organisms.
  - poloniculmov 1y ago
    Brewed beer can get yeast or bacterial infections, especially if you cannot refrigerate it and don't have the means to sanitize recipients.
    - larsga 1y ago
      Yes, it can. But infections by harmful organisms is very difficult to achieve. The common spoilage organisms in beer are all harmless to humans. Here's a good overview http://mmbr.asm.org/content/77/2/157.long http://mmbr.asm.org/content/77/2/157.long Just the hops alone stop pretty much all gram-positive bacteria except Lactobacillus and a few other harmless ones.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

rpmisms 1y ago

Bit of both, but good grog keeps people happy.

ludicrousdispla 1y ago

It is my understanding that the yeast in the beer will consume everything it can and that is what keeps the beer preserved, or safe to drink.

poloniculmov 1y ago
While yeast will consume most of the nutrients, there's still residual sugar in beer. Hops will inhibit microbial and bacterial growth, but they will not stop it completely.
- larsga 1y ago
  Yes, there is residual sugar, but it's complex sugars that not even yeast that specializes in fermenting sugar can consume. Plus there is alpha acids from hops, as you point out, there is alcohol, pH is low, oxygen is gone, there's a CO2 blanket, etc. So it's a very, very difficult environment for microorganisms. Pretty close to none that cause disease can grow in this environment. Is it more than 99.99999999999999% safe? No. Is it vastly safer that water? Yes.

asdfman123 1y ago

Often things that a lot of people do repeatedly for "pure enjoyment" actually has some hidden benefit. Like for instance, drinking in general. People do it because it's fun, but it can play an important social bonding role.

tomwojcik 1y ago
Exactly. To my understanding any amount of alcohol is unhealthy, but societies have had festivals or other rituals since the beginning, and substances _like_ alcohol play an important role in those.

jillesvangurp 1y ago

Water on ships wasn't that clean to begin with. And things were made worse by people maybe not observing good hygiene. Think sharing cups, dipping those in the water, not washing their hands, etc. Imagine that, stored in a poorly sealed barrel on a ship with rats and other pests. Water was pretty bad on ships. People would get sick and weak on longer journeys (malnutrition, contaminated water, rotting food, etc.). A lot of their diseases would spread via water. Beer had a head start on water because part of the process of making it involves boiling the water and the alcohol slows the growth of most of the pathogens. And it has some nutritional value.

oofManBang 1y ago

Point of order, beer was stored in a higher alcohol percentage (which is where we get IPAs from) which does extend its shelf life significantly. The gallon was heavily watered down to serve. Which is basically identical to lite beer we drink today. Hopefully with more flavor, but I don't actually know.