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Comment by tomcam | Hacker News Reader

Raised by alcoholics during the Mad Men days so in reaction I never drank at all. My parents didn’t set a great example. I spent many an hour with a bag of library books outside bars while they boozed it up.

But I often think about the framers of the Constitution drinking vast quantities that fateful, blistering summer of 1787: http://johnjayhomestead.org/wp-content/uploads/In-the-Cups-o...

They were, and remain, literally some of the most functional human beings in history.

Fascinates me to see these two extremes in behavior.

View on HN

Reminded of a slightly less dignified politician: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/aug/09/thatcher.williamh... "Hague: I drank 14 pints of beer a day" - brand not specified, but if we take as "standard pre-CAMRA british beer of the time" Watneys Red Barrel at 3.8% that should give you an idea. He is also accused of exaggerating wildly; to me one pint an hour while doing manual work seems plausible-to-high for someone who's built up a tolerance.

Americans should probably date "stopping being drunk all the time" to Prohibition; the overwhelming national support for it, especially from newly enfranchised women(+), gives an idea as to how big a problem it was.

(+) As a non-American, I had to check this, and Prohibition very slightly pre-dates universal votes for women although both were in 1920 and it may be possible that the franchise differed by state? It's certainly true that women temperance campaigners were very important, given the role of alcohol in domestic violence and budgeting.

Universal prohibition (18th amendment) predates universal suffrage (19th amendment) by a few years, but the two movements had a lot of overlap, and women did widely support the idea and were used to motivate the concept. That said the two are not everywhere the same: the South was had more support for prohibition than suffrage and the west was much more for the right to vote than banning whisky. But also prohibition in the US goes back much farther. Toqueville mentions the idea favorably, many religious movements advocated some form of it (Mormons, shakers, Mennonites,…), and most eastern states still retain a variety of blue laws that restrict alcohol sales and several colleges still retain local prohibitions from 150 years ago.

My grandfather had a worker who’s was drunk all the time. my grandfather would pick him and drop him off and always paid his wife. This would end sometime in the 50’s.

3.8% is fairly low alcohol content. Someone with any tolerance could sip those most of the day and not ever appear drunk.

It's good to note that tolerance to alcohol is bad. It means your body has been damaged and is no longer responding to alcohol as it once did, to protect your organs.

edit: I should also note tolerance to alcohol is a warning that much greater problems are imminent. It is a red flag.

I take it is a red flag concerning addiction and its consequences, but did you have other specific "greater problems " in mind? Just out of curiosity...

Greater problems is not what I have in mind it's biology. Such things as fatty liver and then cirrhosis. Alcohol tolerance is just the tip of that iceberg. The phrase "alcohol tolerance" belies its powerful meaning.

There's an interesting episode of "In Our Time" about the "temperance" movement in the late 1800s, primarily in the UK but also a little in the US. It was a much milder version of the sentiments that eventually (in the US) led to Prohibition. In Our Time makes it sound more like an early self-help movement.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0013zl8

ps. there's also some fascinating speculation at the end about connections between the temperance movement and early movements for women's rights and how that played out very differently on each side of the Atlantic.

Less liquor and much of the beer was whats called small beer or table beer and had very low ABV between 0.5 and 2.0%. George Washington in particular was fond of brewing a bran and molasses based small beer.

Franklin warns against “dram drinking” in his excellent autobiography.

It was 4.5L per day though. Enough to stupefy any man or keep them drunk all day.

"For sailors the beer supplied was of the strong kind (10%-15% alcohol) since this was the only kind that preserved itself well in the sea, hence drunk as a sailor."

Though historical sailors in various navies were punished if they were visibly intoxicated while on duty (off-shift was fine, of course), so either they were incredibly functional alcoholics, they were great at pacing themselves, or that booze was heavily watered down.

4.5L of 0.5% ABV beer would not make you drunk. For comparison, this is equivalent to less than a pint of a typical mainstream beer. Indeed a 0.5% ABV drink can be branded alcohol free (at least in the UK).

Would 4.5L of 2% ABV make you drunk? Depends how quickly you can drink it. It's 9 units of alcohol. We commonly assume the body can process 1 unit/hour so if this quantity was consumed over an entire day, I don't think you'd get merry.

I'm not saying it's a good idea to drink like this, just highlighting the impact of ABV on the outcome.

It’s 8 pints of 13% ABV if you look at the table in the article. Manageable over the course of a day, but you’re definitely drinking.

Which table? The referenced table (9) only says "strong" (relative to what?) and gives a calorie count, which for beer is not very useful as an ABV estimate.

For sailors, in one estimate, and sailors are a special case as the article mentions, because strong beer is the only thing that doesn't go off at sea.

Everyone else is the much lower estimate discussed up thread.

> Manageable over the course of a day, but you’re definitely drinking.

Maybe I'm a lightweight, I would be absolutely trollied if I had to drink eight 13% pints over the course of a day. I have never been anywhere where they'd even sell you an entire pint of 13%, you are in 2/3rd or maybe even 1/3rd territory.

I have a favorite speciality beer that comes in around 13%. They used to sell it only in 22oz bottles and that was it for the night. If I decided to open one, I knew that was my one drink for the evening.

They recently started selling it in 12oz bottles, so it’s no longer a commitment but rather a choice.

Its basically a bottle of wine (lighter one but still). Careful there, the road to alcoholism is smooth and often you realize you're there only way after actually reaching the point.

> Indeed a 0.5% ABV drink can be branded alcohol free (at least in the UK).

Er, no! Perhaps in Ireland? In the UK the term "alcohol-free" can only be used if the drink has no more than 0.05% alcohol. However apparently it's allowed to use the term "alkoholfrei": take a look at the bottles of "Erdinger alkoholfrei" in UK supermarkets with tiny smallprint explaining that it's not alcohol-free (it's 0.5% and tastes quite good).

The rules may have changed fairly recently. They always used to sell "shandy" with 0.5% alcohol as a soft drink to children but I'm not sure if they still do that.

There's another rule that says you can't sell a drink that has the same brand name as an alcoholic drink to children, so children can't buy alcohol-free Heineken (which has 0.05% alcohol), for example.

(I think I read somewhere that they had to create a special exception for soy sauce in Australia because soy sauce can have up to 2% alcohol but obviously nobody's going to quaff it and if they did the 2% alcohol would probably not be their biggest problem.)

I have recently been trying alcohol free / low alcohol beers as the market is picking up for them, and people definitely advertise 0.5% as alcohol free.

From a quick tesco search Punk AF (https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/304722896) and Lucky Saint (https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/311448058) both contain the terms "alcohol free" prominently on the front but are 0.5%.

There are also a bunch of 0.0% beers, and their fine print is how you say, no more than 0.05%, but at least Brewdog and Lucky Saint are getting away with using the term for 0.5%, and I am sure I've seen more of that kind of thing.

You will find this level of alcohol (0.1% - 0.5%) in all kinds of foods and beverages. A study found orange juice that was 0.73% alcohol and hamburger buns that were 1.28%. [1]

The sources and numbers are getting mixed up here but on the topic of the Founders, the small beer George Washington was brewing was probably in the vicinity of 1%. I think it's pretty safe to say that a guy sipping 1% all day might get a bit of a buzz and not much more, especially considering the tolerance he'd build up.

As with anything the dose makes the poison. I've consumed a lot of alcohol over my life, but as I get older my friends and I have mostly lost our interest in experiencing anything beyond a mild buzz. At a bar we frequently order a lemonade/Sprite along with our beers and make DIY shandies [2] which brings the alcohol content down to like 2.5%. It's pretty hard to get drunk at that level even if you go at it for hours. Throw in a water here and there and it's even lower. I only wish society and the industry was more supportive of this manner of drinking, but the bars undoubtedly make less money off of us than the guy who goes full bore and ends up behind the wheel plastered...

[1] https://goodstuffdrinks.com/blogs/the-good-stuff/how-much-al...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shandy

> > Indeed a 0.5% ABV drink can be branded alcohol free (at least in the UK).

> Er, no! Perhaps in Ireland? In the UK the term "alcohol-free" can only be used if the drink has no more than 0.05% alcohol.

The government says the threshold is 1.2%.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/low-alcohol-descr...

If you read your link carefully, it says:

"Low alcohol" -> 1.2% ABV (the threshold at which beer duty has to be paid)

"De-alcoholised" -> 0.5% ABV

"Alcohol free" -> 0.05% ABV

"Non-alcoholic" -> "should not be used in conjunction with a name commonly associated with an alcoholic drink" except communion wine.

Oh, yes. I have no idea how I was reading "alcohol free" as "low alcohol" in the comments to which I responded. My bad!

No, GP is correct.

Advertising Standards Authority:

> The alcohol section of the Codes applies to ‘alcoholic drinks’, which are those above 0.5% ABV. Drinks at or below 0.5% are, for the purposes of the Codes, considered to be non-alcoholic.

https://www.asa.org.uk/news/advertising-zero-alcohol-product...

You're right about this though:

> There's another rule that says you can't sell a drink that has the same brand name as an alcoholic drink to children, so children can't buy alcohol-free Heineken (which has 0.05% alcohol), for example.

and it's 'worse' - you can't buy 'no-secco' or 'apple fizz' or whatever they're marketed as, even though they're absolutely nil alcohol, not removed, it was never there. But obviously other cordials and carbonated soft drinks like San Pelligrino, Shloer etc. are fine, just because they're not made to look like a sparkling wine bottle.

See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/low-alcohol-descr... (as mentioned by darrenf elsewhere in this thread):

"Alcohol free – this should only be applied to a drink from which the alcohol has been extracted if it contains no more than 0.05% abv"

But: "the decision was made to replace the legislation with guidance setting out the four existing descriptors that industry will be expected to follow"

So (1) it's not clear that Brewdog and Lucky Saint (mentioned by SCdF elsewhere in this thread) are breaking an actual law by failing to follow the guidance which Erdinger apparently does claim to follow, and (2) perhaps that rule really does apply only to "a drink from which the alcohol has been extracted", so perhaps it wouldn't apply to a shandy made by diluting alcoholic beer?

Actually I think you're right. The bit I quoted is for the purposes of applying: https://www.asa.org.uk/type/non_broadcast/code_section/18.ht...

which is basically just rules about how you can market (it's fun and cool to drink alcohol kids!) 'alcoholic drinks', i.e. anything under 0.5% can be marketed in ways that says you can't for alcoholic drinks.

But a slightly different page than the one I quoted above goes on to say the same as yours:

> In terms of the official guidance, the descriptor ‘alcohol free’ should only be used on drinks from which the alcohol has been extracted if it contains no more than 0.05% ABV. Where a product has had the alcohol extracted but it remains above 0.05% ABV but at or below 0.5% ABV, the descriptor would be ‘de-alcoholised’.

https://www.asa.org.uk/news/low-and-no-alcohol-drinks.html

So yes, either it tells you something about how they're making it, or they're wrong to be using that 'descriptor'. (Surely the former? Brewdog make 'Punk AF', they'd have to rebrand it completely if they're not allowed to call it 'AF', surely they'd have been on top of that?)

Oh wait though - the page I originally quoted goes on:

> CAP is aware that official government guidance exists on how alcohol content at or below 0.5% should be described, but understands that this guidance is not legally binding. Therefore, the Codes do not require compliance with this guidance.

which explains why I couldn't find anything enacted on legislation.gov.uk. So it is just a matter for them as the regulator, but these two pages on their own site seem to be in contradiction about whether they care about use of the 'descriptor' or not?

> Perhaps in Ireland?

Why make this call out?

The Brit needs to engage in his Paddy bashing.

0.5% is an EU regulation than Ireland specific. And apparently the same level in the US from my (just done now) googling.

Would you like some fish to go with that chip on your shoulder?

How is that an appropriate reply?

Only because it's a different country using English!

Before Austria joined the EU (in 1995) there used to be significant differences in the rules on food labelling between Austria and Germany, to the extent that sometimes a product would have two separate lists of ingredients, one for Austria and one for Germany. The same may now happen with Ireland and the UK, and perhaps the term "alcohol-free" is already being used differently. See https://www.ibec.ie/drinksireland/-/media/documents/drinks-i...

What’s Ireland got to do with the UK’s alcohol laws? If it’s a racist trope you’re trying to make, you might be happy to know that Ireland consumes virtually the same quantity of alcohol per capita as the UK.

I mentioned Ireland because Ireland is in the EU and uses English officially so I wouldn't be at all surprised if the use of "alcohol-free" in Ireland corresponds to the use of "alkoholfrei" in Germany rather than to the use of "alcohol-free" in the UK, those two apparently being different. It honestly hadn't occurred to me that someone might suspect a racist trope!

It’s an EU wide definition that exists in 27 countries not specific to Ireland. Your comment was unfortunately worded if thats the case as at least two other people picked up on the same remark. Apologies if so.

There is no way 2% makes you drunk in practice. When I was 14 drinking 3.5% worked like one or two times before I got used to it. And I drank it really fast.

What you didn't get used to was drinking enough of it. 3.5% will get you drunk in big enough quantity.

Really? Have you tried it? I don't think it is possible for an adult. When I was in China vising a friend we tried to get abit drunk on local beer that was like 3.6% at most and it was like drinking soda. The locals seemed to drink spirits together with low alcoholic beer for some reason so there was no strong beer in stores, except some place that had Heiniken.

I have this pet theory that alcohol is not linear. Like, 5% beer get you way more drunk than the same amount of alcohol in 4.4% beer.

It's the percentage of alcohol in your system (Blood Alcohol Content) that makes you drunk, not the raw amount.

If you're drinking 30-50 units of water for every unit of alcohol, all that alcohol is going to be very diluted and have little effect on your BAC. There's probably a threshold beyond which you'll just piss it all out before the your BAC ever reaches a meaningful number.

That honestly doesn't sound right. Drinking more water won't dilute your blood / BAC. You're mostly limited how fast you can drink that much liquid.

You are limited by how much liquid your digestive system can absorb in any given hour. I've heard that it's somewhere around 1 liter per hour. Any excess liquid is going to slosh around in your intestines instead of entering your bloodstream.

Meanwhile, your liver can remove about 10g/12ml of alcohol per hour. In order for you to reach a meaningful BAC, you will need to absorb significantly more than that.

For example, drinking 1 liter of 1% alcohol solution per hour will not result in any significant BAC, because you can remove alcohol from your bloodstream faster than alcohol enters your bloodstream. You've got a well-optimized queue there.

5 liters of 1% alcohol is the same as above, just repeated 5 times. Your queue is still working fine.

1 liter of 5% alcohol, on the other hand, will dump 50ml of alcohol into your bloodstream within an hour. Now you have a backlog, and this backlog is what increases your BAC.

So dilution does matter, even if the absolute amount of alcohol is the same. You're basically diluting alcohol consumption over time.

I regularly drink 4% beer, and it's not difficult to get quite a bit tipsy on it, you just need to drink more. I regularly see men in pubs who drink 5 liters of such beer in an evening and that does get them drunk.

Sure I agree, but it feels like it is more than 5/4 times more for the same drunkness from 4 and 5% beer.

Who drinks 4.5L of anything a day? That’s 18 x 250ml glasses.

If you’re doing hard physical labour all day on a hot day, maybe you need about that much? It does match advice I have seen for desert hiking.

It's much easier to drink beer than water. When you are working physically in hot weather, it's pretty easy to drink 5L and perspirate most of that.

One time I bicycled something over 40 miles in the hills outside Las Vegas on a 105-degree day. I:

    1. Drank a gallon of liquid (could have been water or sports drink, I don't remember) on that ~3 hour ride.
    2. Didn't pee until I got home -- and not much then.
    3. Came home with dry clothes, despite (obviously) sweating something like a gallon of liquid. There was no evidence of sweat, ever -- it all evaporated.

One time I was helping build a house in summer. I drank 5L of watery low-sugar tea apart from about 1,5L other liquids and peed maybe three times that day. I had dry clothes but very visible traces of salt on them. Other time I drank 7L of beer in a night, but peed like every 20min.

When I was a kid my mom stocked Minute Maid frozen orange juice and powdered vitamin c. When I was sick I would stay home (maybe 11 or 12, different times) and watch TV and drink orange juice. I would fall into a pattern of drinking a 10-12 oz glass of juice during a show segment (maybe 7 minutes) and during the commercial break I’d go pee and refill my juice. On the half hour break i’d make another pitcher. So that works out to something like 3 quarts of heavily-vitamin-c-dosed orange juice per hour for at least several hours out of the day. I have no idea how my kidneys kept up with that.

Ok, but that’s an extreme example and you only consumed 3.8L. 4.5L is a LOT. Even the 8 glasses a day of water suggestion is considered on the high side and that’s only 1.9L.

> Even the 8 glasses a day of water suggestion is considered on the high side and that’s only 1.9L.

The recommended amount depends on who does the recommendation but 1.9L doesn't seem high.

https://www.efsa.europa.eu/fr/efsajournal/pub/1459

"Adequate Intakes (AI) have been defined derived from a combination of observed intakes in population groups with desirable osmolarity values of urine and desirable water volumes per energy unit consumed. The reference values for total water intake include water from drinking water, beverages of all kind, and from food moisture and only apply to conditions of moderate environmental temperature and moderate physical activity levels (PAL 1.6). [...] Available data for adults permit the definition of AIs as 2.0 L/day (P 95 3.1 L) for females and 2.5 L/day (P95 4.0 L) for males."

https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/43403

"The minimum water requirement for fluid replacement for a 70kg human in a temperate zone equates to 3L per day, or 42.9mL/kg [according to the Tropical Agriculture Association]. Minimum requirements for an individual the same size but in a tropical zone equates to 4.1 to 6L/day"

"Age and gender specific Adequate Intakes (AI) for water were established in 2004 by the [United States] Food and Nutrition Board (5). The Dietary Reference Intakes (DRI) for water are [for ages 19 and older] Men 3.7 L/day Women 2.7 L/day"

Reminds me of days of cycling across North Vietnam during the summer : 40c, tropical levels of humidity, very steep hills. I was young, stupid and stubborn.

One stop every 2 hours to chuck 500ml of beer (Bia Hanoi, pretty nice light blond), so about 4 stops a day. It worked fine ! Pee was ok color, enough tipsy to keep my sense but numb the pain of cycling. My clothes had aureola of salt and urea.

I usually do. I have a 2 liter water bottle that I fill up at least twice a day. Though ironically with the heat this summer, I've been exercising and drinking less.

Anyone trying to keep parts of their immune system down.

Obviously they need something to wash down their 40 potatoes a day.

I also find the amount questionable, as I suspect that our modern expectations of what that means and the details of what they meant when they recorded personal consumption means there's something lost in translation here.

Even when I was outside scouting crops 10-12 hours a day on foot in southwest kansas with peak 110F temps, I'd still not need to drink more than 4 liters of water a day. I could push it up another liter, but it wasn't needed and could actually be harmful if one overhydrates. And that's the extreme of the year, way more what I'd reach for most of the year.

Whereas the daily motto of the fuckers was apparently "I am a machine that turns beer into piss"

It's pretty easy to drink four gallons (+extras) on a hot day roofing.

The article also mentioned the beer ration could be passed to families.

Which had me thinking of various pecuniary benefits armies pass and why. Salt -> salary is well documented, on the opposite side slightly less so but still somewhat known was for conquering armies to compensate farmers for essentially pillage as the monetary compensation can't buy much grain nor meat when the army's eaten the village's as well as that of surrounding villages. It also wasn't unusual for state coffers to run dry also, delaying soldiers' salaries, plus graft - several banks still around were founded on the basis of lending to a liquidity starved crown, a modern placation and guarantee of support in the classical baronesque sense perhaps.

And I became curious about all the other money-like tokens, like these beer rations, backed by the promise of a commodity, that floated around in those time, and in ours today. Meandering thoughts, the best kind.

> Salt -> salary is well documented

Is it? At least for Roman soldiers there is no evidence at all that was the case. It just seems to be a myth originating in 18-19th centuries (like a lot of things in popular history).

Doesn't make sense either, as you can't do much with salt except use it on food as seasoning or as a preservative, which are both useless as salary since you still need to pay for your actual food and other expenses.

It would only make sense if it was given to be used a store of value, but they had perfectly good coins to pay salaries with.

> It would only make sense if it was given to be used a store of value, but they had perfectly good coins to pay salaries with.

The Roman Empire towards its end in the west had suffered from a lot of inflation, so coinage was either too expensive for everyday use (i.e. gold-coins, each of which would be a year's salary for a soldier), or worthless (basically just lumps of base-metal).

I think at a certain point taxes were required to be paid in goods rather than coin which really does show that your currency is worthless (when even the state refuses to accept it!)

It's well documented that the word salarius is derived from salt, it's just very unclear why.

Paying out salaries in cash (well, coins) so soldiers can buy trade goods like salt certainly makes more sense than handing them sacks of NaCl.

> It's well documented that the word salarius is derived from salt, it's just very unclear why.

It’s not unlikely that the connection between these were was already merely etymological by that time and made barely any more sense to the Romans as it does to us.

Here's a detailed analysis with reference to primary sources:

https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2017/01/salt-and-salary.h...

tl;dr: There is a genuine linguistic connection between "salt" and "salary", but there is no evidence soldiers were ever paid in salt, or given an allowance specifically for buying salt. Possibly "salary" meant "money for salt" with "salt" used metonymically to mean any trade goods, similar to how "fish" was used in Ancient Greek, but even this is pure speculation.

Your [citation please] got me looking. https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/7159/etymology-of-... ; Google Scholar seemed to provide some references in a search for 'salt salary etymology'.

It is somewhat documented, well documented perhaps.

Correctly documented?

I never finished the recent popular book 'Salt'. After a few chapters it became tedious, repetitive, plus the book consistently omitted tying text to sources. A frustrating read.

As I didn't in fact tie Salt to Roman soldiers' salaries, that was your reading, simply salt -> salary, I'm curious what references you could provide for different etymology? I'm genuinely interested, I rarely reply to replies.

I mean the words might be related but I don’t think there is any evidence that soldiers were actually paid in salt?

Seem like a reasonable analysis:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/jfkkmk/when_...

Fascinating, thanks. Not just for the salt, but the trail and narration. Saved, and saved the old.permalink... to the Wayback Machine just in case.

Salt, and salt-derived commodities (salt-cured fish, vegetables, meat) were major sources of income for societies and governments for quite a long time, so the etymology correlation probably has some legs.

Like a lot of historical things, there's a certain amount of guesswork involved, but it hangs together pretty well. It's unlikely that we'll find the Noah Webster of 100 BC who puts it down on a clay tablet.

I don't think the yeasts they had at the time could get anywhere near 10%, so is he saying the beer was fortified with spirits? I know that Churchill said "The traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, sodomy and the lash" so perhaps it was.

How could they make wine if they couldn't get close to 10% ?

Wine uses completely different yeasts, and probably wasn't as strong either as it is today.

Relatedly I learned the other day how Washington kept some men in captivity who he forcibly took teeth from to cobble together from different men’s oral wounds his famous dentures. Interesting

If you share such a weird story, maybe also provide a link so others can judge whether there is some substance?

I won't be expected to exhaustively cite well-known history you can google in an instant, sorry. You find it weird to learn that Washington had slaves and used their teeth? Don't know what to say - it's what he was. I'm sorry if you got a Florida education :P

There seems to be dispute about it:

"As such, it remains unknown whether Washington personally used any teeth purchased from slaves or others"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington%27s_teeth

So the usual expectation is indeed, if you share uncommon facts, you share the link to those facts, so others can judge more easily, if your facts are facts at all.

There’s no dispute of him having healthy teeth extracted from slaves and having slaves, only on the detail of whether the dentures made from them were used in his own mouth or for someone else. It is also fact that his dentures included human teeth, but maybe not the specific 9 teeth we know he had taken from slaves

> Records at Mount Vernon show that Washington bought teeth from slaves

is what I said, had slaves and took their teeth, except that maybe he didn’t put the extracted teeth into his own mouth and used the slave teeth for some other purpose or a different person’s dentures, you’re correct on that and I thank you for sharing that detail.

This was my understanding too, but the article in the first footnote uses some much larger values for alcohol content. It generally seems well sourced but these numbers are all over the place as if the author first got the numbers and then randomly placed the decimal point and termed some of them 'percentages'.

> Wine is taken to be 0.12 alcohol, the same number is used in modern estimates of alcohol consumption. The amount of alcohol consumed by drinking historical beer brews is between 0.62 to 0.107, the % of alcohol in “small beer” is taken to be around 0.05 and the % in “strong beer” is taken to be around 0.135,

This is the first article that has implied that this historical beer consumption was this high % wise, so I am suspicious of the phrasing "taken to be" that is used all over the place. IDK if this means something specific in the context of scientific papers, but in conversational English it can be interpreted as "a number I made up".

Almost sounds like kvas.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvass

> very low ABV between 0.5 and 2.0%

How did they brew such small beers? Nowadays the non-alcoholic beers (basically 0.5%) are mostly made by removing alcohol after brewing, which greatly affects the taste. I think it's a highly desirable skill to be able to brew good small beers. (Or maybe those beers were just not very good by today's standards.)

Wouldn't you just interrupt the fermentation process before it gets that high? Or add less nutrients for fermentation?

Yes. Also, the yeast strains are much less pure and will probably die sooner.

I'm not sure you get a full enough taste though. I've made low-alcohol beers with fewer grains and lots of hops and it was unbalanced, the base was not there.

I think this is the key point. We want something that tastes like a 21st century beer but otherwise with the properties of an 18th century beer.

That reminds me of Belgian beers which have double the alcohol of your regular beer but tastes like there is barely any alcohol.

Actually, my impression is that the main driver of that "alcohol free beer taste" is the absence of the taste of alcohol. I kind of want to test this hypthesis by adding pure alcohol to an alcohol free beer, but pure alcohol is not really something you find in the supermarket. Germany has a non-alcoholic drink called "Malzbier" (malt beer), which is basically the liquid you would ferment to make beer. It is _insanely_ sweet. So I would expect that a lightly fermented beer would be much closer to a sweet drink than to what we expect under the name "beer".

I have an experiment for you, pour e.g. a 0.5L Erdinger Weißen upside down and observe the resulting mess, then do the same with the 0.5% version of the same beer.

There's much less foam in low alcohol beers, so it's not just the alcohol content (unless that affect it directly in some way I don't know about).

As far as I understand a Hefeweizen is put into the bottle with live yeast, which continue the fermentation and create the characteristic thick foam. So indeed, in that case, you cannot have that effect without alcoholic fermentation.

But I am more of a Pilsener guy, and there are a few good alcohol free Pils which I am convinced would taste like the "real deal" with the added taste of alcohol.

All beer, historically, was bottled with live yeast. That's how you got the carbonation. Some times we cheat today.

Alcohol does change the surface tension so foaming will be different. Ever seen a security guard shake someone's water bottle to check if it's really water?

The thing that makes beer foam stay there is the protein content. Yeast contributes some, but it's also in the grain. The foam should be less different if you compared something filtered like Heineken and Heineken 0.0.

I can buy grain alcohol that’s 95% pure alcohol at my local liquor store. It might be kept behind the counter where I have to ask for it, but it is available.

Grain alcohol is illegal in many states. California restricts alcohol to 60%, for example, so you won't be able to find it in any corporate place, though you can occasionally luck out and find a bottle in a small liquor store that doesn't mind selling pseudo-legal things.

> So I would expect that a lightly fermented beer would be much closer to a sweet drink than to what we expect under the name "beer"

this is not a good expectation. Yeast will consume all available sugar till the alcohol %age gets too high for them (depends on the yeast but even the hardiest cultured strains poop out at around 16%. But they can only consume what sugar is in there, so if you ferment starting with something with little sugar, it will not arrive at a high alcohol level.

Our ancestors did not have access to lots of sugar, even their fruits (therefore juices) were less sweet.

to your point about insanely sweet starter, wine grapes are also insanely sweet, so sweet we don't want to eat them. Table grapes like you buy at the grocery, sweet as they are, are much less sweet than wine grapes. So, starting from the ultra sweet grapejuice, average wine gets to 12% alcohol.

> Actually, my impression is that the main driver of that "alcohol free beer taste" is the absence of the taste of alcohol.

I think it depends on the style. For hoppy ales Athletic Brewing in the US makes really good beers, you can hardly tell there is no alcohol. As far as I heard they don't really remove alcohol, but I don't know how they brew it. (Might be a secret process.)

Regarding German beers, this is also what I find near me now, and they are all decent, but you can definitely tell they don't have alcohol.

Athletic brewing is easily the best non-alcoholic beer I've had. They have less than .5% alcohol which makes me wonder if that little bit helps keeps the flavor profile correct.

I semi-regularly brew kvass, a [delicious] low alcohol content carbonated probiotic drink, and it's quite similar to beer:

- Toast 300g sliced [rye] bread to near burning

- Boil 3 liters of water, turn off, insert/soak bread

- Let sit covered for 6 hours

- Add 150g sugar, 6g instant yeast

- Let sit covered for 18 hours

- Remove bread, strain out extra liquid from it. Birds love it, once it dries out.

- Bottle up the liquid (leave headspace for gassing), and occasionally burp it.

- Wait. Longer bottling period = smoother, less carbonated, more alcohol, less sweet. ~12 hours, but this is very subjective.

- Chill + drink. Take the lid off very carefully, aim away from eyes.

What makes it probiotic? I don't see any addition of bacteria, other than yeast. I thought regular "probiotics" usually contain multiple strains of bacteria?

I suspect it’s the latter. The beers were nothing like the highly polished industrial lagers or ales of today.

In Finland, a home-made small beer (kotikalja) remains a popular drink in the countryside. The alcohol content is around 1%. It’s a sweet brown mush that you can make in one day at home using rye malt sold in every grocery store. Here’s a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtgWBCnOt4M

Kotikalja is the Finnish version of kvas, which is ubiquitous across Eastern Europe.

There's a Tibetan/Bhutanese/north Indian barley version of this too, known as chhang.

Chhang generally reaches around 4-6%, but it is also a generic word for that fermented barley drink, so maybe other regions brew it at a lower ABV.

You can brew a 5% beer, then mix it 10:1 with water, and you'll get 0.5%.

It's not up to modern standards for "alcohol free" beecs, but it works if you're just aiming to hydrate while avoiding pathogens in your water supply.

But you just added 10x water from the questionable supply to your beverage.

Yes, but the alcohol kills the bacteria in the water

Is that true at 0.5%?

No, typically what made beer safe to drink was the boiling, not the alcohol.

I've just finished Pamuk's novel A Strangeness in my Mind, where the protagonist is a street vendor of the traditional Turkish beverage boza. Boza is a mildly alcoholic fermented barley drink considered ok for Muslims to drink. The gradual disappearance of boza sellers in the street is an index of the changes in Istanbul and Turkish society in the late 20th century, really enjoyable book. From what I've read I can imagine it's an acquired taste.

Not forgetting James Boswell:

"Take his entry for the night of 16 October 1783. Boswell records that he and six friends consumed 11 bottles of claret, two of other wines, two of Madeira, three of port, and one of rum. The next night, they polished off 11 bottles of claret, three of other wines, three of port and three of rum."

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2004/dec/19/unitedkingdom...

> Boswell died, aged 47, ravaged by syphilis and cirrhosis

You might be giving everyone else credit for the work of a sober few.

My sibling from another set of alcoholic parent(s)! I too never drank, because of my father's negative example. I tell people "My dad drank enough for the both of us."

Perhaps they were some of the most functional humans despite their alcohol consumption.

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