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

Maybe some ancient folk memory!!

(0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witches%27_Flight

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

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanbenito

https://gizmodo.com/no-medieval-people-didnt-drink-booze-to-...

No idea what the concensus is, but it also doesn't make sense that everyone drank beer instead of water. Young children almost certainly didn't drink beer. And I expect it to have been out of reach for large parts of the population: cost and availability of ingredients.

What's interesting here is precisely that brewing beer was a domestic job (and therefore women's work), in a way that baking bread, for example, was not.

> most villages depended on local bakers to prepare bread ... Most households alternated between making their own ale and buying from and selling to neighbors

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."

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.

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.

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.

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?

I mean it's quite obvious you cannot brew an ursine creature from just water alone.

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/

That seems unlikely on 2% beer while doing hard manual labor.