Our modern culture doesn’t like the idea of people drinking beer all day so there has to be some scientific justification to make it acceptable to modern sensibilities.
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.
Drinking 2 month old stale untreated water... good luck with that.
> they liked drinking beer
Sailors were basically slaves. Nobody cared what they liked. But if crew dies from diarrhia, that is a big problem!
Bacteria (and certainly viruses) can survive 80 proof liquor. 1% alcohol is going to have very little sterilization effect.
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.
How is that enough? A highly nutritious liquid made from grain is a quite perfect environment for all kind of bacteria and other stuff to grow and spread. Relatively clean water? Not so much.
You need closer to 40% alcohol.
> Nobody cared what they liked.
Not in the British Navy. Food was very important to morale and they got a lot of it with the best quality they could manage. Meat every day was luxury few people could afford.
Mutiny was a very real risk. That's why warships carried so many marines. Good food goes a long way to preventing this.
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.
But it comes up a good 2-5x a month. I really want to know where this understanding came from.
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.
Water has always been, is, and will be uncertain. But there's so much evidence of awareness of this that speculating people didn't drink water is absurd. Not to mention keeping water sources clean gets much harder with high populations we see today—we have roughly the same amount of water that we did before
Btw, you casually ACCEPTED that people drank beer instead of water when we know this is false. 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—it just wasn't listed as rationed unless supplies ran low. This was both drunk directly and added to the beer to produce the gallon allocated.
Ie you might follow the same rhetorical technique to say "why do you beat your wife? Well, the evidence is uncertain.", even if we have clear evidence you don't beat your wife.
You'd really have to find evidence that people explicitly avoided water to make such a claim. In all situations I can think of there was either certainty it was not potable (ie seawater, poisoned well, flooding, etc) and being unable to boil it.
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.
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.
Source: Cider Country (James Crowden)
This might be true for some specific region or subset of ships, though.
dddw•5h ago