could you point to the specific part of those Wikipedia entries that says that very large quantities of these drinks were taken because of the difficulty of finding clean water? Or were you making another point here?
You’re not going to find a well defined germ theory breakdown of the potability of water because it did not exist. It’s not like they could identify clean water vs dirty water. It’s not like drinking dirty water meant you were going to die either. Generally speaking, people understood that drinking more alcoholic drinks was likely to have health benefits among other things, hence the term “water of life”. Drinking alcohol was seen as a move that would improve your health, including as literal medicine. It was frequently drank because it was good for you. Not strictly because they knew they couldn’t drink the water. They did drink a lot of dirty water too.
> Drinking alcohol was seen as a move that would improve your health, including as literal medicine
Even if that’s true it’s not at all related with alcohol being a replacement for water. It’s like if someone if in 400+ years decided that most people in the 2000s only ate supplements instead of actual food due to similar reasons.
The drinks we are discussing here are extremely weak and definitely going to hydrate you.
> Even if that’s true it’s not at all related with alcohol being a replacement for water. It’s like if someone if in 400+ years decided that most people in the 2000s only ate supplements instead of actual food due to similar reasons.
Then maybe read my whole post where I explicitly said they drank a lot of dirty water
https://x.com/tony_breu/status/1034891346069413888
I too have heard about the theory about how alcohol was safer to drink than water, however, a lot of literature also points to the fact that aclohol was consumed mostly for inebriation.
Your reference to “literature” is not correct. The drinks being discussed here were incredibly weak, and were often given to folks like workers and children. Definitely not to get drunk. That is not to say there wasn’t other alcoholic drinks that people consumed for the purpose of getting drunk.
It was boiling that kills the bacteria and people knew that it improved the “quality” of water that wasn’t safe to drink.
I wonder if people in a few hundred years will think that we drank so much coke/etc. because tap water was dirty an polluted with lead. Because that sounds about as silly as this myth..
Also, people regularly drink bottled beverages to avoid unsafe water conditions. A light Beer is actually one of the very safest things you can drink because the carbonation makes it very unlikely that they’re not giving you a refilled bottle while traveling
It doesn’t have much in common with premodern/medieval light table beer.
However, the Small beer Wikipedia page says that very large quantities of these drinks were consumed
> It was common for workers who engaged in laborious tasks to drink more than ten imperial pints (5.7 litres) of small beer a day to quench their thirst
And that it was believed to be good for people
> "For the drink of the more robust children water is preferable, and for the weaker ones, small beer"
The fact that aqua vitae means "water of life" is also evidence for this.
Regardless there is plenty of evidence that medieval people drank plenty pf water. Why do some people feel so strongly about this myth?
Weak unfiltered beer will go bad on a couple of days even if you keep it in a fridge if it’s not properly sealed.
Also hoops weren’t widely used until the high/late middle ages.
It shouldn’t be particularly crazy or controversial
Any evidence besides conjecture to back this up?