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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

AIUI consensus is that people did drink water but also quite a lot of beer.

"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 ..."

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To be honest if you are unaware of the bad effects of beer or how addiction works in general, it seems like a thing that you would get so easily addicted to.

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.

I assume these beers were pretty low ABV. Addiction to alcohol probably was pretty common and perhaps preferable to dysentery.

Yes, this is called Small Beer or Table Beer in Belgium. It goes as low as 1% and was very normal in schools and at homes before clean water was a common thing.

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.

I don't know when the rules changed but when I was a child in England in the sixties anything less than 2% could be sold to anyone, it wasn't regarded as properly alcoholic. The brand I remember is Top Deck Shandy, half and half lemonade and light beer.

The quoted bit specifies small beer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_beer#History

Common beers back then were very different from today's beer. Beer was more of a liquid meal, with lots of calories and about half the alcohol content of a Coors Light.

Honestly that sounds kinda awesome to me. I'd love to try it

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