> 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.