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Beer is boiled, which destroys most pathogens you might worry about. You could boil plain water and be safe, but that wasn't understood until later, see pasteurization.

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.

> You could boil plain water and be safe, but that wasn't understood until later

Not sure that's true. We have evidence that ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans (and I assume other societies) understood that boiling water made it safer to drink. Basic sand/gravel filters.

Hypocrates for instance described a method of boiling water and then filtering it through a cloth to purify it and remove "bad smells".

To be fair even if you have no clue about bacteria it's not a particularly complex concept to understand. If for instance pre modern people truly drank beer because it was safer surely at some point one of them would've asked the question why is that the case?

In addition, if hops (or other herbs) were used in the boil, the acids from the hops (what gives beer its bitter bite), even in small amounts, would provide anti-bacterial benefits to the beer.

For the medieval period, it would have been other herbs. Hops are something of a later addition. I don't believe that they came into very widespread use until the reformation era.

And at about 0.5% ABV you digest the alcohol at about the rate you can drink it (assuming you drink it at anything below a "competitive" rate. Just like, as much as you'd drink socially, or with a meal, or for rehydration)

I don't think you're actually applying logic. Your priors make exactly no sense.

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?

The idea that people only drank beer because it was safe and water wasn't is a myth, yes.

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."

No one is saying water was always safe, you are making a straw man so you can do a both sides thing.

People where obviously worried about water safety, yes. Fermented drinks are not guaranteed to be safe though. The 2% isn't going to do much.

The brewing process helps a bit but you you can just boil water after all.

The question is not whether water safety was a concern, it certainly was but whether people brew beer MAINLY for safety reasons. I think it is safe(!) to assume they brew beer because they liked drinking bear.

> The 2% isn't going to do much.

2% of what? If you mean alcohol, that is not how fermentation works for preserving food/drinks.

Using beneficial/harmless cultures to outcompete harmful microorganisms, which is how fermentation is used to preserve food/drinks, has been the main way of preserving food across cultures. Especially before fridge, canning and and other modern industrial techniques have been possible. Yeah I do not get the "beer instead of water" thing, but I can imagine there could be a lot of situations that beer could be important to have as a water source, like traveling distances.

> The brewing process helps a bit but you you can just boil water after all.

Was this widely known?

No, not before Louis Pasteur. It's likely that people knew brewed beverages were safer but didn't know why, and didn't know they could skip most of the brewing process and simply boil the water.

They didn't knew about bacteria and wouldn't have had the theory to explain why it would help.

Boiling water wasn't really that necessary because the medieval period was sparsely populated and people had access to safe water sources. I am sure they would have figured out boiling water if their survival dependent on it.

We know that People generally knew about basic hygiene and applied it even if they lacked modern theory.

> They didn't knew about bacteria and wouldn't have had the theory to explain why it would help.

That didn't stop say, the sterilization effects of silver from being widely known and spread across myths.

Fewer people got sick when they drank from silver cups and silver stuff. They didn't know a thing about bacteria, but enough people drinking from enough different cups and suddenly a pattern emerges that forms the basis of a myth or legend.

> We know that People generally knew about basic hygiene and applied it even if they lacked modern theory.

Soap and its effects to destroy common pathogens (viruses and bacteria) wasn't known... but "Hygiene" became a thing as early as 400BC Roman periods because of similar patterns.

The theories we have today summarize centuries or millennia of collective experience. Not the other way around. We don't need to understand bacteria to discover how useful soap, boiling, or silver/anti-bacterial surfaces are. Instead, we use our knowledge of "silver prevents sickness", "soap prevents sickness", and "boiling prevents sickness" to help us discover a grand theory of microorganisms / bacteria.

Hippocrates did suggest this approach of purifying water so at least educated doctors would've have certainly known that. Also it's not exactly rocket science most people would have probably understood that to some extent. At least that boiling removes "bad" smells and improves the taste (that's what Hippocrates said at least, not how effective that is).

Since you can read my mind I don't think I have anything else to contribute here.

> Think about it logically, you can not brew bear from water that is contaminated in the first place.

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.

> 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.

You might want to reread what I wrote, yes it was only like 2 percent. The problem is, how anti-septic is 2% beer? It is not. It doesn't really help in any meaningful way.

If you want stable beer that you can transport over longer distances you want higher alcohol concentration but then again higher alcohol concentration isn't exactly great for keeping people hydrated.

> The problem is, how anti-septic is 2% beer?

It feels like you're deliberately not reading or addressing all the answers telling you that boiling water to make beer is what made it safe.

Well if alcohol itself is irrelevant why did they not simply boil the water before drinking it without making a beer from it?

I think the fact that people just like to drink beer is a much better explanation of why did they drink so much of it. The "safer to drink" part was secondary at best.

Did they know boiling water made it safe to drink? Or did they only notice that drinking beer caused less diarrhea than drinking water?

I'm not denying that the tastiness of beer was a factor.

Hypocrates specifically recommended doctors to boil and filter water before giving to patients to drink.

Ancient Egytpians, Indians and Romans understood that boiling makes water safer to drink as well (Galen even suggested using boiling water to sterilize surgical instruments).

IMHO it makes perfect sense in the context of the miasma theory (if people thought that "bad smells" were the main vector spreading diseases and illnesses and boiling water removes bad smells, improves taste etc. then it also must have made it safer to drink).

>I guess people just really like the idea of medieval people being shitfaced all the time.

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/

Is drinking 3.5 gallons of whiskey or rum per year that big of a societal problem? That's only a little more than 1 oz per day. If someone is drinking to the point of disfunction I would expect their consumption to be a great deal more than that.

First, it's amongst all people - so toddlers, kids and non- drinkers too. Second, it's pure alcohol count. Not 3,5 gallons of whisky, but so much whisky that there was 3,5 gallons of pure alcohol in it.

That's absolutely insane. Too bad prohibition created organized crime and gun control in the US.

> I guess people just really like the idea of medieval people being shitfaced all the time.

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

This isn't just wrong because of the beer thing, but people also drank a variety of herbal teas and other drinks, the most popular being a boiled barley drink. Just like now people prefer drinking something with more flavor then water.

> This myth again? You don't even need to know medieval history to figure out it is bullshit.

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.

This is a good starting point with some good sources linked: https://leslefts.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-great-medieval-wat...

By the way, this is the mainstream position among historians, it is only pop culture that hung up on the water myth.

A significant portion of the examples in that link follow the form:

This person is so holy that they drink water.

The very fact that it was a sign of unusual holiness to drink water seems to undermine the point. It's like saying "in the 2020s people mostly didn't use cell phones. Look at this passage about a group called the Amish, see what I mean?".

> Think about it logically, you can not brew bear from water that is contaminated in the first place.

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

Bears are 75% water so it'll get you most of the way there.