I think it’s important to point out that almost everyone drank beer and it wasn’t because the water was bad. It was because they liked drinking beer.
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.
> 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.
Ever gotten a bad case of gastroenteritis from a restaurant that made you swear never to go back and even turned you off an entire style of cuisine for, at least, a little while?
A few brushes with bad water might have given folk a strong preference for beer, just to be on the safe side, even if most water was safe.
Beer staying fresh seems like a proxy for voyage duration. Longer trips means more likely to have run out of beer/vitamin C sources. No beer probably means no dock where sailors could have consumed anything other than highly preserved food.
A caveat being and mentioned in the article, that sailors didn't have access to the safe water of lakes and streams, thus beer. And as someone mentions below, it's safer to drink low alcohol beer than months old (untreated) water. I can see why people jump to the conclusion that beer was safer than water...and it makes for good cocktail hour small talk.
> 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.
The alcohol wasnt what made beer safe. Beer was safer than water because to make bear one must use sterile water. So beer at least started out sterile/boiled before it went into the barrel.
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.
Anyone downvoting this comment is not understanding how common this myth is, or not bothering to google to verify their own understanding. It's by far the most asked-about myth on /r/askhistorians. Someone asked this under 24 hours ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k5ji8i/how_...
But it comes up a good 2-5x a month. I really want to know where this understanding came from.
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.
I don't really get your point. Water isn't necessarily safe now, either. Just like now, you boil water if you are aware of risk. Just like now, people communicated about when to boil, where to gather water, skinning people alive for messing with the water (well that has perhaps improved a little bit), militaries would regularly poison water sources. And of course, you can find people today who willingly take dumb risks for no explicable reason. All of your uncertainty applies just as much to today as it did in the past.
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.
Getting these people drinking water is hard, maybe even harder than brewing beer. Is there any campaigns to get africans to drink a gallon of beer a day?
> "Beer" had like 1% of alcohol content. Just enough to keep it without bacteria.
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.
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.
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.
The boil does kill the bacteria, but it's not preserved after the boil. At best it's as sterile as water; at worse it spoils faster due to the abundance of nutrients.
That's why it's kept sealed, under pressure. I wouldn't fill a water bottle and let it sit for many months before drinking it ever today. A beer bottle with CO2 atmosphere can sit for a long time.
There may be other reasons to prefer beer where the alcohol is relevant of course, just not for freshness. And freshness could absolutely have been relevant in the choice of drinks to load, together with low cost and acceptance in general.
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.
Some sailors were basically slaves, but like most slaves, they required a minimum to prevent revolt, especially at sea where they vastly outnumbered commanding officers and there was no reinforcement.
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.
I think it’s important to point out that almost everyone drank beer and it wasn’t because the water was bad. It was because they liked drinking beer.
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.
> 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.
Ever gotten a bad case of gastroenteritis from a restaurant that made you swear never to go back and even turned you off an entire style of cuisine for, at least, a little while?
A few brushes with bad water might have given folk a strong preference for beer, just to be on the safe side, even if most water was safe.
Beer was known to go bad on long voyages. So long as the beer held out though there was no scurvy.
Beer does not cure scurvy. Scurvy is caused by a lack of vitamin C, which is not in beer.
Beer staying fresh seems like a proxy for voyage duration. Longer trips means more likely to have run out of beer/vitamin C sources. No beer probably means no dock where sailors could have consumed anything other than highly preserved food.
A caveat being and mentioned in the article, that sailors didn't have access to the safe water of lakes and streams, thus beer. And as someone mentions below, it's safer to drink low alcohol beer than months old (untreated) water. I can see why people jump to the conclusion that beer was safer than water...and it makes for good cocktail hour small talk.
> 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.
Bit of both, but good grog keeps people happy.
The alcohol wasnt what made beer safe. Beer was safer than water because to make bear one must use sterile water. So beer at least started out sterile/boiled before it went into the barrel.
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.
Anyone downvoting this comment is not understanding how common this myth is, or not bothering to google to verify their own understanding. It's by far the most asked-about myth on /r/askhistorians. Someone asked this under 24 hours ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k5ji8i/how_...
But it comes up a good 2-5x a month. I really want to know where this understanding came from.
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.
I don't really get your point. Water isn't necessarily safe now, either. Just like now, you boil water if you are aware of risk. Just like now, people communicated about when to boil, where to gather water, skinning people alive for messing with the water (well that has perhaps improved a little bit), militaries would regularly poison water sources. And of course, you can find people today who willingly take dumb risks for no explicable reason. All of your uncertainty applies just as much to today as it did in the past.
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.
Getting these people drinking water is hard, maybe even harder than brewing beer. Is there any campaigns to get africans to drink a gallon of beer a day?
"Beer" had like 1% of alcohol content. Just enough to keep it without bacteria.
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!
> "Beer" had like 1% of alcohol content. Just enough to keep it without bacteria.
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" had like 1% of alcohol content.
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.
start with pasturization, then add hops. Beer will go bad but not fast-
> Just enough to keep it without bacteria.
Bacteria (and certainly viruses) can survive 80 proof liquor. 1% alcohol is going to have very little sterilization effect.
It's not the alcohol that's supposed to kill bacteria, it's the long boil.
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.
The boil does kill the bacteria, but it's not preserved after the boil. At best it's as sterile as water; at worse it spoils faster due to the abundance of nutrients.
That's why it's kept sealed, under pressure. I wouldn't fill a water bottle and let it sit for many months before drinking it ever today. A beer bottle with CO2 atmosphere can sit for a long time.
There may be other reasons to prefer beer where the alcohol is relevant of course, just not for freshness. And freshness could absolutely have been relevant in the choice of drinks to load, together with low cost and acceptance in general.
> "Beer" had like 1% of alcohol content.
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.
Some sailors were basically slaves, but like most slaves, they required a minimum to prevent revolt, especially at sea where they vastly outnumbered commanding officers and there was no reinforcement.
In the 17th and 18th centuries cider was far more prevalent on board - and massive amounts of it to boot.
Source: Cider Country (James Crowden)
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.
No mention of sauerkraut ?