> the claim is not against people drinking beer or water, it is against doing so out of some general fear of drinking water.
Okay, if that's the claim I would say the state of research at the moment is not 100% clear. It's quite possible that it's not why people did it.
> Perhaps I was too strident in my criticism of your substantial comments; I apologize.
Accepted!
> If water was generally regarded as less safe than beer, why were so many people brutally executed for messing with it?
Good question. One answer might be: because some people were forced to drink it even though it was unsafe, so making it even more unsafe was considered criminal. It's worth looking into, though.
> Surely it is not a coincidence that springs whose water you didn't need to boil later grew towns and cities?
I wonder how that worked out -- once there's a town around it the spring must become less safe. Do you have references on this? Doesn't need to be scholarly, just something specific.
> Why was disease so strongly associated with the presence of armies if people weren't consuming the water that forms the natural vector for transmission?
You can get diseases from food that's not properly washed, from your hands, etc. Many diseases also are transmitted via lice etc.
My claim is not that people never drank water. We know they did. But we also know they tried to stick to better things when they could. An army on the march is a classic case of people who would have a hard time consistently getting alcoholic drink because of poor logistics. So you'd expect at least parts of the army to be forced to drinking substandard stuff quite often.
> Perhaps there is room for degree of safety that might explain how water can both be safe and unsafe.
Oh, there absolutely is. What's more, people knew there were differing degrees of safety. Linné says exactly that in his 1749 pamphlet on beer (quoted in my blog post). Max Nelson also has a paper discussing how people made these distinctions in antiquity.
> My concern is [...] with the widespread impression that people in the past simply didn't drink water.
We're in agreement on that. They did drink water. They also very clearly preferred not to, but were often forced to. Why did they prefer not to? Not clear. Was the water unsafe? Yes. At least quite a lot of it. Did they know that? To some extent they clearly did. In summary form, that's basically as far as I've gotten.
Again this is stuff you're just inventing because you don't know better.
> Boiling the water first avoided many spoilation problems that, today, we know how to prevent through other means.
You have this backwards. Boiling or near-boiling the water is what's nearly universal now. It was much less common in the past.
> Prior to modern knowledge, beer recipies were based on trial and error.
Correct. However, all beer is mashed. You don't get beer without it. That's a one-hour 65C pasteurization at the very least. As far as we know, all European beer from the stone age until now was made this way. So you can take this part as ordained by the gods of chemistry. So no matter what you do about the water initially, the whole thing will be pasteurized afterwards.
There are still people today brewing traditional beer from recipes based on trial and error, with zero input from modern science. Some of them start with a mix of cold water and malts that they then heat in the kettle. Here's an example of me visiting and brewing with a guy who does exactly that https://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/409.html
If you want I can make you a map of where in Scandinavia and the Baltics people used this method the last 100-200 years. Before that people often didn't have kettles, and so (as far as we know) the water was not heated before brewing (long story exactly why we think so).
Wooden barrels were sealed and could handle high pressure. The trouble is that (long story) it was very difficult to get a precise amount of pressure, so people generally didn't even try. There are videos online of cases where people have failed and end up battling a beer barrel spraying beer like a firehose.
You're broadly right, but they were popular for most of the period we're discussing.
In continental Europe they were popular from roughly ~1000 onwards (see Behre 1999), in England from roughly 1500 onwards. In African and South American farmhouse brewing they're still not used. So it's a pretty complicated picture.
As the comment made clear, hops are only one component of what makes beer safe, though. Storable, safe beer for travel is documented already in Ancient Egypt.
Yes, there is residual sugar, but it's complex sugars that not even yeast that specializes in fermenting sugar can consume. Plus there is alpha acids from hops, as you point out, there is alcohol, pH is low, oxygen is gone, there's a CO2 blanket, etc. So it's a very, very difficult environment for microorganisms. Pretty close to none that cause disease can grow in this environment.
Is it more than 99.99999999999999% safe? No. Is it vastly safer that water? Yes.
Yes, it can. But infections by harmful organisms is very difficult to achieve. The common spoilage organisms in beer are all harmless to humans. Here's a good overview http://mmbr.asm.org/content/77/2/157.long
Just the hops alone stop pretty much all gram-positive bacteria except Lactobacillus and a few other harmless ones.
> Based on what? You certainly haven't given any indication of having read what historians have to say.
I am a historian. This is based on 10 years of reading ethnographic archive documentation of what people used to drink on farms, plus of course wide reading of ethnographic and historical literature on this.
> Clean water was arguably much more common than it is today because of industrial contamination.
Now imagine the effect on your well, which usually would be downhill from the houses.
> Nobody contests this. What is contested is fear of drinking water.
Actually, lots of people contest that people used to drink beer, but that's fine. Let's move on.
I agree fear of drinking water is tricky. Evidence on this one way or another is hazy and ambiguous, but it seems to be more a preference for beer. What motivated the preference is again tricky to pin down.
It's easy to come up with quotes showing aversion to water. Just look at the first page of Linné's "A Description of Beer" (actual title in Swedish) from 1749. It says straight out that many kinds of water are harmful and therefore people prefer beer. But it doesn't mean this was a general belief, and there's plenty of evidence the other way.
> Btw, you don't need metal to boil water.
I already linked to a paper on how to boil water without. But it does mean that it was difficult. And people didn't know they needed to. So they didn't.
>> I don't claim that people explicitly avoided water
>Yes you did:
Quote is missing or garbled somehow.
> > What I do claim is that people did drink lots of beer for thirst in various contexts (listing exactly which would make this too long).
> I have no doubt that someone in history said this, just as they did now; what I find hard to believe is that this was in any way normal or typical.
I think at this point the best thing I can do is point you to this, which is a relatively superficial summary of the evidence as I know it: https://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/433.html
Note the map with coloured dots. Every single one of those dots is a primary source where someone describes their own home parish.
The subject deserves a proper paper, but it's going to take a while before I have time to put one together.
No, it wouldn't. It's very difficult to produce beer where harmful organisms can multiply. Post-fermentation it's an extremely difficult environment for most organisms.
> Just like now, you boil water if you are aware of risk.
People didn't do that, though. As far as I can tell, water-drinking was not particularly common. People went to surprising lengths to produce other forms of drinks, all of them fermented in some way.
> All of your uncertainty applies just as much to today as it did in the past.
What on earth do you mean by that? Today you have clean water from taps all over your house. In the old days, clean water was rare, and you had to carry it home. If you were lucky you could use a wagon, but it was still hard work.
I mean, yes, of course there was risk then and risk now, but the risk was orders of magnitude higher in the past.
> Btw, you casually ACCEPTED that people drank beer instead of water when we know this is false.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. I've worked on this for a decade, collecting archive accounts from around Europe. I can quote you pages and pages and pages and pages of people writing about how they used to drink beer against thirst every day. Read [my book](https://www.brewerspublications.com/products/historical-brew...) for more.
> Even on ships (as you would know if you clicked through the askhistorians link under the top of the thread) ships did carry (a lot of!) water
Buy a subscription to Craft Beer & Brewing and read my article on [skibsøl](https://beerandbrewing.com/skibsol-smoky-ale-of-the-seas/) the Danish style of beer created expressly for the purpose of being drunk by sailors. It starts with the story of the gov't commission created to investigate improving the sailors' beer after the Battle of Køge Bay.
> You'd really have to find evidence that people explicitly avoided water to make such a claim.
I don't claim that people explicitly avoided water, because the evidence is thin and ambiguous. (Seriously, read the comment you replied to!) What I do claim is that people did drink lots of beer for thirst in various contexts (listing exactly which would make this too long). Exactly why they did is not clear, but we do know people thought beer was healthy. Probably they thought it was healthy because it has lots of calories. (This was a time when getting enough to eat was a challenge for large parts of the population.)
> sailors didn't have access to the safe water of lakes and streams
As if the water of lakes and streams was necessarily safe. Imagine drinking Thames water in the era before proper sewers. In 1858 (the Great Stink) the Thames stank so badly from feces that parts of Parliament became unusable.
Beer has had a huge range of alcohol strengths, from Mesopotamia until today, so that statement is nonsensical.
> Just enough to keep it without bacteria.
1% is not enough to keep bacteria from growing in a beer. In general, more alcohol means it will keep longer, but to be truly safe you need to go quite high. This is a pretty complex issue, though.
As a general statement about Europe or the UK that's completely impossible. There wasn't enough cider for it to be more common than beer. We also know beer was the most common (then later grog, at least for the navy).
This might be true for some specific region or subset of ships, though.
First of all, many types of beer were historically not boiled. Quite a few still aren't. The mash, however, pasteurizes the beer.
That, however, doesn't last forever. In the conditions of the 18th century or whatever, microorganisms will get into the beer after mashing/boiling, so the heat treatment only helps for a while. The fermentation really does protect the beer afterwards, but it's a combination of low pH, alcohol, low oxygen, little nutrients, CO2, etc. Hops also help against gram-positive bacteria.
This is complete and utter nonsense. The water used in beer often had bacteria (and other stuff) but to brew beer you must mash, at 65C for an hour or more, which pasteurizes the beer. Hops protect the beer against bacteria, and the yeast also makes it hard for other organisms to multiply in the fermented beer. Alcohol is one of those ways, but only one.
> The percentage of alcohol required to preserve beer for long periods is too high for sailors to be drinking a gallon of it per day.
Reading this thread I think the best thing would be if people were forbidden from comment on the history of beer in online forums. Nobody knows anything, yet everyone is shouting their misunderstandings from the rooftops.
The Danish fleet, to take just one example, was completely dependent on a supply of "skibsøl", to the extent that the king started his own brewery to ensure his fleet had a supply. Later kings started a stupid brewing monopoly system in Copenhagen to ensure no breweries went bankrupt, again with the same aim. "Skibsøl" was a big thing in Norway and Sweden, too. The Royal Navy used to serve it, too, before switching to grog.
Yes, weak beer will turn sour, but it takes a lot to make it harmful.
The thing is that water was not really safe to drink, no matter what these people may tell you. There's a reason there are huge aid campaigns all over the Third World to ensure people have access to safe water. Some water is relatively safe to drink, but even in the wild you can get giardasis and other problems from drinking it. The more human beings are nearby, the more of an issue it becomes.
In the time before cars transporting water was not easy, so people usually had to get water from the nearest source. Wells were not necessarily safe, especially because both humans and animals tended to shit pretty much everywhere. Even today well water is not necessarily safe.
But did people know that drinking water was unsafe? Evidence on that is contradictory. They were certainly aware that some kinds of water was safer than others.
And was this why people drank beer instead? Not clear at all. It's completely possible they did it simply because they wanted to, although it was seen as healthy. That was because of the calories, though.
In many places they did not drink beer, however. Scotland and Norway drank blaand (a whey drink), and Eastern Europe drank a lot of kvass. Fermented birch sap and a drink from juniper berries were common, too. Not to mention a weird drink known as rostdrikke/taar/etc depending on language (takes too long to explain).
What I find interesting about this is that nobody seems to care to really dive into the details and describe the situation as it actually was. I realize it's a lot of work, but still.
Okay, if that's the claim I would say the state of research at the moment is not 100% clear. It's quite possible that it's not why people did it.
> Perhaps I was too strident in my criticism of your substantial comments; I apologize.
Accepted!
> If water was generally regarded as less safe than beer, why were so many people brutally executed for messing with it?
Good question. One answer might be: because some people were forced to drink it even though it was unsafe, so making it even more unsafe was considered criminal. It's worth looking into, though.
> Surely it is not a coincidence that springs whose water you didn't need to boil later grew towns and cities?
I wonder how that worked out -- once there's a town around it the spring must become less safe. Do you have references on this? Doesn't need to be scholarly, just something specific.
> Why was disease so strongly associated with the presence of armies if people weren't consuming the water that forms the natural vector for transmission?
You can get diseases from food that's not properly washed, from your hands, etc. Many diseases also are transmitted via lice etc.
My claim is not that people never drank water. We know they did. But we also know they tried to stick to better things when they could. An army on the march is a classic case of people who would have a hard time consistently getting alcoholic drink because of poor logistics. So you'd expect at least parts of the army to be forced to drinking substandard stuff quite often.
> Perhaps there is room for degree of safety that might explain how water can both be safe and unsafe.
Oh, there absolutely is. What's more, people knew there were differing degrees of safety. Linné says exactly that in his 1749 pamphlet on beer (quoted in my blog post). Max Nelson also has a paper discussing how people made these distinctions in antiquity.
> My concern is [...] with the widespread impression that people in the past simply didn't drink water.
We're in agreement on that. They did drink water. They also very clearly preferred not to, but were often forced to. Why did they prefer not to? Not clear. Was the water unsafe? Yes. At least quite a lot of it. Did they know that? To some extent they clearly did. In summary form, that's basically as far as I've gotten.