Aren't modern drinks more alcoholic? 5% by vol beers, 12.5% wines.
Walking into any of those craft brew places where I live I'll be lucky to find 5% almost everything is some crazy 6.5% and up now.
Though I will say that the current trend with Double IPAs and Hazy IPAs where they all now start at 7% and go up to 10% is definitely outside of the historical norm.
But it gets weirder the more you look at it, and especially once you get into the 1700s. There is a proliferation of spirits drinking in the Anglosphere starting then, split between Gin and Whiskey. Gin became a big thing in London, probably at something like 30% alcohol, but was sold in beer volumes. People were drinking pints of straight gin, to the point where it became a big public health crisis. And of course you get the importation and rise in popularity of whiskey distilling from Scotland to the American colonies as a means to use up excess wheat and corn in a shelf stable way. From the 1700s until prohibition I get the impression that public drunkenness was FAR more common in the US and (to a lesser degree) the UK than it is now.
Although it doesn't specify weight or volume, but the 5% alcohol beer seems to be equivalent of the "small beer".
There are also the "pure alcohol" charts in the table that I think try and account for it.
Also there's the comment about beer for sailors in the 10-15% range.
So taken together it seems modern people are indeed an awful lot less drunk than they were in the middle ages.
If you’re referring to the “0.05” figure i think that is just out of a unit of 1. IOW multiply by 100 to get %. They use % in other parts of the post.
Beers and Ales used hops and boiled water.
Drinking water near large population centres were not boiled or treated.
People that mostly drank wines, beers, and ales likely suffered fewer bouts of dysentry and worse.
Here’s a competing theory—people liked beer, and drank a lot of it. If we want to get past armchair history, we need something more than a patchwork of unfounded speculation. We want something that would lead us to believe that one explanation was better than the other, or perhaps both are good, or neither.
There's no need to be a tosser (see HN guidelines), it's an argument that comes straight out of Medieaval recipe books for make beers and ales, straight from the time of the great miasma, and from the mouths of many UK historians.
It’s frustrating, because I’ve been told off for asking for evidence, even though I didn’t ask for evidence.
Every time I try get an answer, all the resources I find contradict the claims here. Water was the most common drink. Communities were built around wells or other water sources. The Romans built massive systems of aqueducts so they could have more water. I did a Google search and found a page full of results directly contradicting the claim that people drank beer because it was cleaner.
Also medieval authorities to great effort to keep water sources unpolluted with outright draconian punishments for those who did that. Of course they didn’t always succeed.. but still.
The point of medieval beer and ale making exercises was to make beer and ale, (which required boiling water as part of the common recipes of the day).. which very likely created a notable difference between those drinking mostly large amounts of low alcohol beer | ale made from boiled water compared to those that mostly drank unboiled liquids.
> which very likely created a notable difference between those drinking
Well I suppose they were somewhat more drunk most of the time and also more well off since they could afford it?
Also again, you can make assumptions but I’m not aware that there is substantial evidence that this was the case.
While silver and other noble metals have antimicrobial properties, the percentage of alcohol in altar wine is way too low to make a difference.
When transubstantiated from wine to blood, it retains the accidents of wine, and those accidents will infect you with a disease just as any other.
That's the miracle of the Eucharist; our feeble senses can't distinguish it, nor could a microscope or science lab point out which is Eucharist, and which is ordinary wine.
Almost all Western churches suspended distribution under the species of wine, even though the odds were very, very low.
The Eastern Orthodox couldn't do this, however, and it led to several Greek bishops insisting that no disease could come from this Holiest of Mysteries, and that it is uniquely special and don't worry about COVID-19.
5% ABV does not kill much. You’d need distilled spirits for that.
Somewhat made up for by people having less body mass, though.
A school of though existed at the time that believed that bathing was dangerous and a time that “allowed the venomous airs to enter and destroyeth the lively spirits in man and enfeebleth the body” (Thurley, Pg. 171).
Among other things:
> The beer in these accounts was graded with the nomenclature typical of the period. Historians generally identify three main strengths of beer in accounts and brewing instructions: ‘strong beer’, perhaps with a particular seasonal association like ‘October’ or ‘March’; ‘ordinary’ or ‘household’ beer; and ‘small’ beer. Within these categories, there was variation in quality and strength, and a tendency for types to overlap. Names also varied over time. While such issues make estimating the relative amounts of each type produced difficult, there are indications that ordinary beer was the most consumed overall, particularly by the working classes. This is confirmed by the Irish accounts. At Dublin Castle, household production focused on two kinds, strong and ordinary, of which far more was drunk of the latter. In the yearly account for 1574, only 13 per cent of beer consumed was strong. Other years showed similar values.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/yeast-fermentation...
"Most yeast strains can tolerate an alcohol concentration of 10–15% before being killed. This is why the percentage of alcohol in wines and beers is typically in this concentration range."
I assume temperature and other factors play a role in how successful you are at keeping them alive that long though.
And some strong wines can be sweet, because the grapes had so much sugar that the yeast couldn't ferment it all.