From the depiction of the home as the woman’s sphere in medieval Northern European literature, it isn’t surprising that brewing was women’s work along with cooking in general.
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
This probably just comes down to availability of equipment. Bread making in the home has been common in places like England and India for a long time. In places like Austria and France the preference is for bread that is best from special ovens that people don't have at home, but even there people would make things like brioche at home.
Brewing is more efficient in terms of labor as you scale up to larger containers, but it's less extreme.
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.
"Young children almost certainly didn't drink beer." - wanna bet?
> In his A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education, in Boarding Schools published 1797, writer Erasmus Darwin agreed that "For the drink of the more robust children water is preferable, and for the weaker ones, small beer ..."
If I had a different knowledge set and easy access to beer, perhaps I would just drink it daily.
Without water I imagine there are going to be massive hangovers though.
It still is a very popular beer to drink while you eat but children don't consume it anymore. My father did tell me that when he was younger (1970-1980) they still drank it at the table in his school.
A lot of online sources cite a 1926 study that said bread can have ‘up to 1.9%’ alcohol content. This more recent study from 1998 suggests that 0.4-0.6% ethanol by mass is more typical: https://auventdunord.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/food-alco...
[1] https://www.isu.edu/news/2019-fall/no-worries-the-alcohol-bu...
https://web.archive.org/web/20110306073320/http://digital.li...
>out of reach for large parts of the population
Claims that the poster base on nothing at all, but still claim it in a peremptory fashion.
> I expect it to have been out of reach
Neither of these statements are claims at all.
It definitely wasn't something frequent or high dosage though.
I actively started drinking with peers around the age of 12 - 14. That was in secrecy from parents though, asking homeless to buy us the goods.
After I was 14 and more, alcohol was introduced on more regular bases, but not with social pressure to drink, just was available as an option.
Decades later, I'm just a social drinker.