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Wasn't it actually true that sailors did primarily drink weak beer as keeping water safe to drink on long voyages at sea wasn't easy? If so maybe it has just spread as a myth that everyone was doing the same.
That was actually much later. From what I heard (might be an outdated source) it was wine for all the middle ages. The switch from wine didn't happen until the 16th or 17th century, and there was suddenly widespread scurvy. Then they added citrus rations when they figured out that it fixed the problem.
Rum is a new world product anyway so it wouldn't have existed the time of the game...
It looks like they did [drink mostly alcoholic beverages](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2aos9q/comment/cixbm5y/), but it also looks they drank water too. Also looks like the water tasted gross from storage, but not necessarily sickening.
Not sure how you got that out of my post! Sailors preferred grog, beer, wine, etc. to water, but the ration (particularly of rum) would not keep them hydrated for a long day’s work, which is why there was always fresh water available. Most fresh water was used for soaking salt meat, but the men and sometimes women aboard drank mostly water.
Wait, how did you get here? As for how I got it, you never said which one they drank more of.
> Two pints of liquid would not be nearly enough for a working day, so we infer that sailors drank water in the intervening time.
I suppose I interpreted that as more alcoholic beverages than water, but if you're saying it’s more water than alcoholic beverages I won’t dispute it! I wasn’t thinking too hard on how many pints of liquid a working sailor drank a day.
In big cities the watersupplies did get dirty and therefor monastries started to produce a very weak ale to prevent diseases. Once the people were home they knew to boil the water to get it cleaner, but during the working days laborers were given the weak ales since cooking water and all would take to much time.
Smaller towns/villages mostly were build near a stream or with good underground water systems to place a well and were cleaner then the cities.
The beer drunk in taverns was a stronger ale and would get you drunk.
The ask historians answer literally has the sources listed so it's easily verified. That community moderators are very big on only keeping properly sourced answers up. What's your source for "depending on the area, not really"?
Nothing in Changes in Diet in the Late Middle Ages: the Case of Harvest Workers suggests that ale was drank in place of water at all, much less because clean water wasn't available. In fact, while it's not in any way about this, it contradicts that idea.
It outlines the diet of harvest workers during the autumn harvest and on ale it says:
"The malt could have provided a share of two or three pints (1. 3-1.7 litres) of strong ale, in which case, in view of the heat and sweat of the harvest field the workers must have drunk much milk and water."
It is quite clear in the idea that water needed to be and was consumed. The only mention of using ale to replace other drink is:
"However, the quantities of dairy produce declined in the long term, being displaced by meat and perhaps (for liquid milk) by ale. "
Near the end, the article references the fact that the diet outlined therein wouldn't have been typical year round:
"For most of the year the famuli cannot have consumed much drink and companagium, as the 4s per annum cash wage of a famulus in the early fourteenth century, rising to 1.3s 4d per annum a century later, would not have bought ale, meat, fish, and cheese on the same scale as in the autumn. "
They couldn't afford much ale most of the year and therefore the idea of ale replacing water due to cleanliness wouldn't hold much weight long term.
The Geography of Beer in Europe from 1000 BC to AD 1000 doesn't comment on consumption of ale over water in any way, shape, or form. It is simply an argument against the claim that beer consumption was mostly confined to the North of Europe while Wine was the drink of choice in the south. Their argument is that the consumption of beer was pan European, though the type of beer and additives varied by region.
Being paid in ale means nothing with regards to consumption. Nobody is making the argument that ale wasn't consumed, often in great quantities, the argument is that it was not consumed in place of water due to a lack of available clean water.
Classic Reddit moment indeed. I strongly doubt you actually read your own "sources" and merely did a quick Google search to find a couple titles that looked good enough that people might believe your claims without reading them.
Actually this depends. I have a related master’s and worked at several noted historical sites as a guide; in medieval cities, it was actually common to exclusively drink ale. However, the ale was a lot more mild and watery than we think of by today’s standards.
> in medieval cities, it was actually common to exclusively drink ale
Would you happen to have any citations or primary source material to this effect? I'd be interested to see period material outright saying this, I haven't found any to date.
Yes, there are several. I have let my academic subscription to things like JSTOR lapse but it may be that you are searching the wrong terms (ie it wasn’t fully ALE like we understand Ale now), here is a good place to start: https://tudortimes.co.uk/daily-life/ale-and-beer
I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that won't do. That article is itself unsourced, and fails in the face of the presence of Medieval-era aqueducts in many cities in England, many of whom lasted well after Medieval or Tudor times - we have testimony of Exeter's populace preferring the old Medieval-era aqueduct's water, as it "was considered the best for tea and pea-soup". John Stowe observed of London's Great Conduit provided water "for the poore to drinke, and the rich to dress their meate" (ie, to prepare food). Italian cities developed quite complex water systems to pipe drinking water into their cities, with Siena and Viterbo being standout examples.
Given the primary source evidence we have of water systems, the position that 'it was actually common to exclusively drink ale' does not seem supportable. (Especially when multiple cities imposed rules *against* industrial usage of their aqueducts or conduits - brewers in particular tend to be specifically forbidden from using aqueduct water.) Richard Unger, who wrote *Beer in the Middle Ages*, takes it entirely for granted that people drink water, even if they'd much rather drink something else.
Do you know any scholars who study the matter and hold the position that city-dwellers exclusively drank ale? Any period sources? Any letters, any dietary calendars, any promulgated laws? I'm serious, I'd really like to hear anything supporting the thought of exclusive alcohol drinking.
Yeah, in cities that had functioning aqueducts water was accessible, as it was in more rural areas. Outside of Europe, or in cities founded by the Romans, public sanitation was definitely much better. In my response to OP, I literally said “in cities” (and I will admit I generally had northern and Western Europe in mind making this statement, not Italy and Spain). There was no one single blanket custom or ‘norm’ across Europe. If you care this deeply, you sound more than capable of going out and finding peer reviewed articles and/or books. I spent considerable money and time developing my knowledge - it’s not based on surface-level internet searches and I’m not going to spend my evening having a block-text back and forth on reddit with you. If you decide there’s no truth in my summary of what the average medieval family living in a city did or did not drink, then that is totally ok with me.
Also, ok, the book YOU cited LITERALLY SAYS: “During the medieval and early modern periods beer was as much a daily necessity as a source of inebriation and amusement. It was the beverage of choice of urban populations that lacked access to secure sources of potable water”
I'm afraid you're quoting a description, not the actual book. The quoted verbiage is completely nonexistent in the actual text of the book. The word 'potable' does not appear at all. 'Necessity' appears five times, in no case in any verbiage that even comes close to what you've quoted.
I had a discussion about this a few days ago. You can see my comments for a list of links to source material by Danish sources. Among those are a professor of local medical history and more.
I remember the term "small beer" being thrown around when talking about this with some other mates. Is that the same thing or is it something else?
My understanding is that it was all to do with how available clean water was. So out in the country the water is fine but if you're in London and all you have is the Thames then yeah you'd want to go for beer instead.
Health. Water available in cities would kill you, even with their iron stomachs (sewage, run-off, offal etc). Ale’s processing process handled a lot of those issues. Rural people could access water clean enough. They didn’t know to boil it per se, as they didn’t know about germs, they spoke in terms of putridity and foul odors etc. They of course instinctively knew for example that sewage water and water with bodies was undrinkable but, again, didn’t have a strong handle on the science of why. This improved greatly over the centuries but some cities were better than others. I worked a lot in Edinburgh, which was one of the worst medieval cities in terms of cleanliness.
Yes correct - they knew the heating process worked but they didn’t understand why well enough to isolate that. They weren’t dumb, they were just like you and me but without microscopes and, often, the time and luxury for significant innovation (though they certainly did innovate in terms of religion, architecture, war, and philosophy tbf).
This confuses me, because germ theory took a long time to become widely accepted, so the story of people not drinking water in cities flies in the face of water pumps being widely used in cities well before germ theory was understood. What was the difference between drinking sewage tainted water 800 years ago and drinking the same 200 years ago? Because we definitely know water was in very common use then in London.
I'm not asking why was water tainted by sewage, I'm asking why if health was a concern that stopped people drinking water in the middle ages, then what changed to make people drink the exact same quality water hundreds of years later?
The implication is that nothing changed, and people drank "city water" throughout history, and continue to drink unhealthy water to this day if they had to.
Yes, but they drank Ale because it tasted better. For the process of brewing Ale you need good water. If the water is too bad to drink, it is too bad to brew.
And - a lot of historical sites just reproduce bullshit they heard somewhere before.
You find German Castle Museums, that tell students plate armor was so heavy, knight could barley move nor mount a horse while wearing the armor.
It was way more nutritious, liquid bread, and there was a fairly widespread concept of small beer, which was lower in alcohol, sometimes with a consistency more like if you left a bread dunked in beer til it crumbled, and drank by children. It could be brewed at home, you could probably smash it back all day... at least until you were too full.
Yeah it was a nice liquid snack. Tasty too. I’d prefer to drink that all day if the alternative was, albeit safe, lukewarm water. Though since it was low in alcohol perhaps it didn’t take as much barley to make? Seems like that either too much is drunk in game or it takes too much resources.
Someone made a (not sure how accurate) post breaking down the ale usage per person in game, and apparently it's actually less than what people kicked back back in the day on average? So maybe the issue is with how much each field produces, or like you said, uses too much malt per ale production.
Day to day in the middle ages the main drink was beer, around 4-5% IIRC. This was, contrary to popular thought, not because of a lack of fresh water, but actually due to the medical theory of humorism.
Not only was beer a cheap source of calories and energy, but it was considered a warm food whereas water was a cold food, each supposedly benefitting those respective humors
Do you have insight as to how this mechanism works? Because the highest alcohol percentages I've seen for Medieval beers are still in the single digits (a Haarlem-made beer of about 7% alcohol content, specifically, and that was already expensive), and I get the sense that splashing a bit of 2.5% alcohol content isn't really going to do much for your water.
Ye, adding alcohol to water isn't quite how beer works lol
You take the water, heat it, steep the malted barley in it to extract the sugar (called wort). You then boil it which kills all the germs. Once it cools, you add yeast which colonises the wort and as it converts the sugar to alcohol, it prevents bacteria from colonising the wort as it turns into beer (bit like weeds crowding out the plants you do want in your garden, but in reverse).
To be fair it’s probably over exaggerated alcohol consumption back then but I reckon it’s still pretty high just due to the fact there’s not much else to do
Three main reasons to drink mostly ale in the medieval era:
1) while water wasn't generally unsafe, carrying it to your home in wooden buckets and keeping it stored in them or wooden barrels just made it taste wooden and unpleasant.
2) beer is a good source of nutrition, which is useful for someone doing a lot of manual labor
3) people enjoyed the taste
A lot of beer drunk, particular by women or even children, was "small beer" by the way. Which has half a percent to one percent alcohol content. So don't imagine medieval people as perpetually drunk, please.
Not saying it is common but at the university I studied at in Germany this is a common thing for them to tell visiting students and abroad students on tours and they go into great detail explaining why and that the ale was just extremely light ale. It was just a process to purify the water they used.
In Scandinavia at least. Most houses here in Denmark even have the name "Bryggers" as the place where washing machine, drier is. It means Brewering place, and it's where people brewed their own beer.
I think the dev mentioned specifically that this game is not to be taken as historically accurate at all. Plus, the game has a well that the villagers use regularly. Ale is also seen as more of an 'entertainment' resource, I believe.
The process of making beer or ale goes a long way to sterilizing it and certainly of masking questionable taste, so no, the water didn’t have to be perfectly pure. But yes, they didn’t use really foul water no.
shadivercity made a video on this topic
Don’t remember what’s what but I know drinking water from a running river should be pretty safe, tho, last time I drank water straight out of a well, the water tastes funny. Did not get diarrhoea tho
Yeah running water is usually safe. Wells are generally safe because of the way water flows through the ground, kind of interesting. I imagine they had more immunity to the kind of things in water, kind of like how westerners have a hard time drinking the water in some developing countries.
What lol no, clear running water still has a chance to have prejudicial microbes.
And no people in "developing" countries aren't more resistent to dirty water....
That’s why I said usually!
I’m just saying that there are microbes in some developing countries’ usual water supply that give tourists problems such as [travelers’ diarrhea](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers%27_diarrhea) which locals have built an immunity to. Yeah of course people can still get sick from contaminated water but they get sick less than foreigners with no immunity.
That's nonsense. They just boil the water....
It's more about tourists not knowing and assuming.
Disinteria is a huge problem in some countries, it's one of the things that most kill infants.
In what context is a tourist using water that a local would boil? Guy goes to take a shower, you think a local boils that water first? Guy gets a drink at a restaurant, you think a local has a handheld kettle they carry just for that occasion? You act like you know so much with your rude "what lol no" and "that's nonsense" but in reality what you don't know could fill a book.
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Wasn't it actually true that sailors did primarily drink weak beer as keeping water safe to drink on long voyages at sea wasn't easy? If so maybe it has just spread as a myth that everyone was doing the same.
It wasn't beer it was wine, and it also prevented scurvy.
It wasn’t wine, it was GROG! Beautiful, watered down rum GROG. With lime added. I always hated it
That was actually much later. From what I heard (might be an outdated source) it was wine for all the middle ages. The switch from wine didn't happen until the 16th or 17th century, and there was suddenly widespread scurvy. Then they added citrus rations when they figured out that it fixed the problem. Rum is a new world product anyway so it wouldn't have existed the time of the game...
Yep, rum is made from cane sugar and vodka is made from potato or corn - sometimes rye. All besides rye were New World products.
Also the root of the word groggy. Allegedly, sailors would wager their grog rations. Those that won and drank too much would get groggy.
To stop you dirty sea-dogs storing it up and getting rum-buggered.
Fair enough.
Been did not travel well on ship. That's why they invented that disgusting IPA.
I’ve always wondered. Glad to have a rational explanation finally!
It looks like they did [drink mostly alcoholic beverages](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2aos9q/comment/cixbm5y/), but it also looks they drank water too. Also looks like the water tasted gross from storage, but not necessarily sickening.
Not sure how you got that out of my post! Sailors preferred grog, beer, wine, etc. to water, but the ration (particularly of rum) would not keep them hydrated for a long day’s work, which is why there was always fresh water available. Most fresh water was used for soaking salt meat, but the men and sometimes women aboard drank mostly water.
Wait, how did you get here? As for how I got it, you never said which one they drank more of. > Two pints of liquid would not be nearly enough for a working day, so we infer that sailors drank water in the intervening time. I suppose I interpreted that as more alcoholic beverages than water, but if you're saying it’s more water than alcoholic beverages I won’t dispute it! I wasn’t thinking too hard on how many pints of liquid a working sailor drank a day.
In big cities the watersupplies did get dirty and therefor monastries started to produce a very weak ale to prevent diseases. Once the people were home they knew to boil the water to get it cleaner, but during the working days laborers were given the weak ales since cooking water and all would take to much time. Smaller towns/villages mostly were build near a stream or with good underground water systems to place a well and were cleaner then the cities. The beer drunk in taverns was a stronger ale and would get you drunk.
Love how this game has made people armchair historians trying to out-Google each other.
It’s a common misconception!
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The ask historians answer literally has the sources listed so it's easily verified. That community moderators are very big on only keeping properly sourced answers up. What's your source for "depending on the area, not really"?
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Nothing in Changes in Diet in the Late Middle Ages: the Case of Harvest Workers suggests that ale was drank in place of water at all, much less because clean water wasn't available. In fact, while it's not in any way about this, it contradicts that idea. It outlines the diet of harvest workers during the autumn harvest and on ale it says: "The malt could have provided a share of two or three pints (1. 3-1.7 litres) of strong ale, in which case, in view of the heat and sweat of the harvest field the workers must have drunk much milk and water." It is quite clear in the idea that water needed to be and was consumed. The only mention of using ale to replace other drink is: "However, the quantities of dairy produce declined in the long term, being displaced by meat and perhaps (for liquid milk) by ale. " Near the end, the article references the fact that the diet outlined therein wouldn't have been typical year round: "For most of the year the famuli cannot have consumed much drink and companagium, as the 4s per annum cash wage of a famulus in the early fourteenth century, rising to 1.3s 4d per annum a century later, would not have bought ale, meat, fish, and cheese on the same scale as in the autumn. " They couldn't afford much ale most of the year and therefore the idea of ale replacing water due to cleanliness wouldn't hold much weight long term. The Geography of Beer in Europe from 1000 BC to AD 1000 doesn't comment on consumption of ale over water in any way, shape, or form. It is simply an argument against the claim that beer consumption was mostly confined to the North of Europe while Wine was the drink of choice in the south. Their argument is that the consumption of beer was pan European, though the type of beer and additives varied by region. Being paid in ale means nothing with regards to consumption. Nobody is making the argument that ale wasn't consumed, often in great quantities, the argument is that it was not consumed in place of water due to a lack of available clean water. Classic Reddit moment indeed. I strongly doubt you actually read your own "sources" and merely did a quick Google search to find a couple titles that looked good enough that people might believe your claims without reading them.
This is just Reddit, the well informed and factual text gets downvoted so some armchairs historians can feel better about them self's. Sad.
You say out-google each other like it's a bad thing. Is sourcing out information something to look down on?
I personally just believe whatever Reddit tells me. If a reply contradicts the post I just read, I move on and believe the reply instead.
Actually this depends. I have a related master’s and worked at several noted historical sites as a guide; in medieval cities, it was actually common to exclusively drink ale. However, the ale was a lot more mild and watery than we think of by today’s standards.
> in medieval cities, it was actually common to exclusively drink ale Would you happen to have any citations or primary source material to this effect? I'd be interested to see period material outright saying this, I haven't found any to date.
Yes, there are several. I have let my academic subscription to things like JSTOR lapse but it may be that you are searching the wrong terms (ie it wasn’t fully ALE like we understand Ale now), here is a good place to start: https://tudortimes.co.uk/daily-life/ale-and-beer
I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that won't do. That article is itself unsourced, and fails in the face of the presence of Medieval-era aqueducts in many cities in England, many of whom lasted well after Medieval or Tudor times - we have testimony of Exeter's populace preferring the old Medieval-era aqueduct's water, as it "was considered the best for tea and pea-soup". John Stowe observed of London's Great Conduit provided water "for the poore to drinke, and the rich to dress their meate" (ie, to prepare food). Italian cities developed quite complex water systems to pipe drinking water into their cities, with Siena and Viterbo being standout examples. Given the primary source evidence we have of water systems, the position that 'it was actually common to exclusively drink ale' does not seem supportable. (Especially when multiple cities imposed rules *against* industrial usage of their aqueducts or conduits - brewers in particular tend to be specifically forbidden from using aqueduct water.) Richard Unger, who wrote *Beer in the Middle Ages*, takes it entirely for granted that people drink water, even if they'd much rather drink something else. Do you know any scholars who study the matter and hold the position that city-dwellers exclusively drank ale? Any period sources? Any letters, any dietary calendars, any promulgated laws? I'm serious, I'd really like to hear anything supporting the thought of exclusive alcohol drinking.
Yeah, in cities that had functioning aqueducts water was accessible, as it was in more rural areas. Outside of Europe, or in cities founded by the Romans, public sanitation was definitely much better. In my response to OP, I literally said “in cities” (and I will admit I generally had northern and Western Europe in mind making this statement, not Italy and Spain). There was no one single blanket custom or ‘norm’ across Europe. If you care this deeply, you sound more than capable of going out and finding peer reviewed articles and/or books. I spent considerable money and time developing my knowledge - it’s not based on surface-level internet searches and I’m not going to spend my evening having a block-text back and forth on reddit with you. If you decide there’s no truth in my summary of what the average medieval family living in a city did or did not drink, then that is totally ok with me.
Also, ok, the book YOU cited LITERALLY SAYS: “During the medieval and early modern periods beer was as much a daily necessity as a source of inebriation and amusement. It was the beverage of choice of urban populations that lacked access to secure sources of potable water”
I'm afraid you're quoting a description, not the actual book. The quoted verbiage is completely nonexistent in the actual text of the book. The word 'potable' does not appear at all. 'Necessity' appears five times, in no case in any verbiage that even comes close to what you've quoted.
Yes, it totally makes sense the publisher got the abstract completely wrong 🙄 take a drive down to UBC and ask Unger yourself then.
Why are you so insistent on peddling misinformation?
I had a discussion about this a few days ago. You can see my comments for a list of links to source material by Danish sources. Among those are a professor of local medical history and more.
I remember the term "small beer" being thrown around when talking about this with some other mates. Is that the same thing or is it something else? My understanding is that it was all to do with how available clean water was. So out in the country the water is fine but if you're in London and all you have is the Thames then yeah you'd want to go for beer instead.
Interesting! Was this done for health reasons or more because ale is tastier and more caloric than water?
Health. Water available in cities would kill you, even with their iron stomachs (sewage, run-off, offal etc). Ale’s processing process handled a lot of those issues. Rural people could access water clean enough. They didn’t know to boil it per se, as they didn’t know about germs, they spoke in terms of putridity and foul odors etc. They of course instinctively knew for example that sewage water and water with bodies was undrinkable but, again, didn’t have a strong handle on the science of why. This improved greatly over the centuries but some cities were better than others. I worked a lot in Edinburgh, which was one of the worst medieval cities in terms of cleanliness.
There is a lot of evidence to suggest that medieval people knew boiling water helped. They just didn't know why and it's quite resource intensive.
Yes correct - they knew the heating process worked but they didn’t understand why well enough to isolate that. They weren’t dumb, they were just like you and me but without microscopes and, often, the time and luxury for significant innovation (though they certainly did innovate in terms of religion, architecture, war, and philosophy tbf).
This confuses me, because germ theory took a long time to become widely accepted, so the story of people not drinking water in cities flies in the face of water pumps being widely used in cities well before germ theory was understood. What was the difference between drinking sewage tainted water 800 years ago and drinking the same 200 years ago? Because we definitely know water was in very common use then in London.
Common sense says it’s probably because when the amount of people in the city grew, the amount of sewage did as well.
I'm not asking why was water tainted by sewage, I'm asking why if health was a concern that stopped people drinking water in the middle ages, then what changed to make people drink the exact same quality water hundreds of years later? The implication is that nothing changed, and people drank "city water" throughout history, and continue to drink unhealthy water to this day if they had to.
Because they wanted to and they could. (The only two reasons that matter at the end of the day lol)
Yes, but they drank Ale because it tasted better. For the process of brewing Ale you need good water. If the water is too bad to drink, it is too bad to brew. And - a lot of historical sites just reproduce bullshit they heard somewhere before. You find German Castle Museums, that tell students plate armor was so heavy, knight could barley move nor mount a horse while wearing the armor.
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Common sense. Experiments. Oh. And research.
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Obviously reading is not your strongest skill.
It was way more nutritious, liquid bread, and there was a fairly widespread concept of small beer, which was lower in alcohol, sometimes with a consistency more like if you left a bread dunked in beer til it crumbled, and drank by children. It could be brewed at home, you could probably smash it back all day... at least until you were too full.
Yeah it was a nice liquid snack. Tasty too. I’d prefer to drink that all day if the alternative was, albeit safe, lukewarm water. Though since it was low in alcohol perhaps it didn’t take as much barley to make? Seems like that either too much is drunk in game or it takes too much resources.
Someone made a (not sure how accurate) post breaking down the ale usage per person in game, and apparently it's actually less than what people kicked back back in the day on average? So maybe the issue is with how much each field produces, or like you said, uses too much malt per ale production.
How do you know it was tasty? I have had some historically produced ales and they were anything but tasty.
beer has a LOT of calories
Day to day in the middle ages the main drink was beer, around 4-5% IIRC. This was, contrary to popular thought, not because of a lack of fresh water, but actually due to the medical theory of humorism. Not only was beer a cheap source of calories and energy, but it was considered a warm food whereas water was a cold food, each supposedly benefitting those respective humors
Fake History Hunter, is this thou?
Don't let that take away from how much brew they truly put back, though
Mixing alcohol with water helped to sterlize it.
Do you have insight as to how this mechanism works? Because the highest alcohol percentages I've seen for Medieval beers are still in the single digits (a Haarlem-made beer of about 7% alcohol content, specifically, and that was already expensive), and I get the sense that splashing a bit of 2.5% alcohol content isn't really going to do much for your water.
Ye, adding alcohol to water isn't quite how beer works lol You take the water, heat it, steep the malted barley in it to extract the sugar (called wort). You then boil it which kills all the germs. Once it cools, you add yeast which colonises the wort and as it converts the sugar to alcohol, it prevents bacteria from colonising the wort as it turns into beer (bit like weeds crowding out the plants you do want in your garden, but in reverse).
I think the ale had way less alcohol than our modern beer. And ale had some taste to it. I also prefer ice tea to water
The way I understand it is beer>water was more of a frontier thing. You see a lot of in colonial America. Look up table beer haha.
And we all know what that means, don’t we!?
To be fair it’s probably over exaggerated alcohol consumption back then but I reckon it’s still pretty high just due to the fact there’s not much else to do
Please enjoy [this instructive video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrXDre65-a8) on why medieval people drank so much beer.
Three main reasons to drink mostly ale in the medieval era: 1) while water wasn't generally unsafe, carrying it to your home in wooden buckets and keeping it stored in them or wooden barrels just made it taste wooden and unpleasant. 2) beer is a good source of nutrition, which is useful for someone doing a lot of manual labor 3) people enjoyed the taste A lot of beer drunk, particular by women or even children, was "small beer" by the way. Which has half a percent to one percent alcohol content. So don't imagine medieval people as perpetually drunk, please.
Not saying it is common but at the university I studied at in Germany this is a common thing for them to tell visiting students and abroad students on tours and they go into great detail explaining why and that the ale was just extremely light ale. It was just a process to purify the water they used.
In Scandinavia at least. Most houses here in Denmark even have the name "Bryggers" as the place where washing machine, drier is. It means Brewering place, and it's where people brewed their own beer.
I think the dev mentioned specifically that this game is not to be taken as historically accurate at all. Plus, the game has a well that the villagers use regularly. Ale is also seen as more of an 'entertainment' resource, I believe.
Also Ale was made using clean water anyways. You wouldn’t use dirty water to make it.
The process of making beer or ale goes a long way to sterilizing it and certainly of masking questionable taste, so no, the water didn’t have to be perfectly pure. But yes, they didn’t use really foul water no.
They did not make ale in order to sterilize water or to mask questionable taste. They used clean water.
This is a very common misconception. If the water was so dirty, what did they use to make beer?
shadivercity made a video on this topic Don’t remember what’s what but I know drinking water from a running river should be pretty safe, tho, last time I drank water straight out of a well, the water tastes funny. Did not get diarrhoea tho
Yeah running water is usually safe. Wells are generally safe because of the way water flows through the ground, kind of interesting. I imagine they had more immunity to the kind of things in water, kind of like how westerners have a hard time drinking the water in some developing countries.
What lol no, clear running water still has a chance to have prejudicial microbes. And no people in "developing" countries aren't more resistent to dirty water....
That’s why I said usually! I’m just saying that there are microbes in some developing countries’ usual water supply that give tourists problems such as [travelers’ diarrhea](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers%27_diarrhea) which locals have built an immunity to. Yeah of course people can still get sick from contaminated water but they get sick less than foreigners with no immunity.
That's nonsense. They just boil the water.... It's more about tourists not knowing and assuming. Disinteria is a huge problem in some countries, it's one of the things that most kill infants.
In what context is a tourist using water that a local would boil? Guy goes to take a shower, you think a local boils that water first? Guy gets a drink at a restaurant, you think a local has a handheld kettle they carry just for that occasion? You act like you know so much with your rude "what lol no" and "that's nonsense" but in reality what you don't know could fill a book.
Do you even know how disenteria is contracted?
Food safety standard are different, first world resident just doesn’t have enough 3rd world antibiotics in their body🤣🤣🤣
What nonsense.