Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

ianvisits.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 98 posts

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#71

Post by nevinera »

These types of posts are .. well thought-out, and usually posted by someone with relevant education. But they are not reviewed documents or journal articles, and you can _tell_ when someone is mixing in a lot of their own educated guessing with the research they've done. Which is the case here.

He probably wasn't intending it to be taken as authoritative source, but that's how most people will _read_ something like this after running into it on the front page of HN. And most of this is just.. guesswork.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#72

Post by thaumasiotes »

kergonath wrote: post #68
thaumasiotes wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And in all of those places you'd usually noted how bad is the taste of water, so many people knew it's unsafe not just from tradition, but also from the bad taste. Considering the strength of the Chinese taboo on cold water, I find that fairly unlikely.

We often say that the US are not the world and that we should not assume that something is natural just because American do it. Well, it’s also true for China and overall people in a specific place having a specific taboo tells us very little about human health or their understanding of it. So no, a Chinese taboo on cold water does not tell us anything about a human tendency to drink water any more that a people’s ta…

People in a specific place having a specific taboo can tell us a lot about how likely they are to engage in the tabooed behavior. The argument was that people in China would have noted the bad taste of their raw water. In order to do that, they would have had to drink it, which I find unlikely.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#73

Post by cardanome »

legitster wrote: post #63
cardanome wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, people drank water. But (especially in urban settings) they drank A LOT of low abv drinks. The vast majority of people in the medieval period did NOT live in cities. Furthermore the cities that did exists where way less densely populated and would more look like bigger villages to the modern eye. It is the modern world with it's industrialization and high population density that has the problem of getting safe…

While cities were smaller, I think people forget the inverse, which is that rural areas were much more densely populated. The farms were very small, required lots of labor, and were always close to the manor of a lord or parish. Which almost invariably had a bakery, brewery, and a well present. These services were very convenient to the average peasant, and I was surprised to learn how few medieval homes even had a h…

Having access to fresh water is not the same as saying any puddle of water was 100% safe.

You bring up traveling when the vast majority of people did not travel. At all. Maybe to the next market if we talk later medieval period but that was it really. (I do use bottled water when traveling because I am only used to the local bacteria and it is easy to get sick at first when going to a new country.)

As you write most settlements especially early one were very self-sufficient. So they would have some source of water that could be safely consumed. Remember, even for beer brewing you need to start with clean water. Sure heating it up helps with bacteria but you can't brew beer with dirty swamp water. It will be gross.

The whole antisemitic conspiracy theory of Jews poisoning the well only works if people were actually drinking from the well. Not that antisemitism needs to be very rational but it shows that people had a considered safe source of water they regularly drank from.

> But if I may posit something - the average person's distaste for drinking plain water is somewhat universal across time and cultures and might very well be a human adaptation.

I don't think hunter-gatherer societies where big on beer brewing. The whole building settlements thing is a very recent innovation in evolutionary terms so probably not enough time has passed for such a trait to become relevant.

Plus I mean our brains like sugar and carbohydrates very much, we quickly learn to crave alcohol and coffee. We can already explain why people might drink something else than plain water.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#74

Post by pjlegato »

doingtheiroming wrote: post #35

There’s a line in one of the Aubury Maturin books, Clarissa Oaks when pumping the ship bilges, a sailor remarks, “she flows as clear and sweet as Hobson’s conduit”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson's_Conduit Fresh water was consumed in prodigious quantities in the Royal Navy, not least for watering down grog but also for extracting the salt from salted meats.

Other way around -- grog wasn't so much diluted with water as the grog was applied TO the fresh water as an antiseptic.

Fresh water on ships had typically been sealed inside a barrel for months or even years before it was consumed, growing all manner of unhealthy pathogens. Pre-germ theory people read this as "it smells and tastes bad," which is a pretty good first-order approximation of germ theory.

When you cut that contaminated water with alcohol, that greatly reduces illnesses from drinking it, especially in those whose GI systems are already somewhat adapted to tolerate the pathogens. Strong spices in grog such as cloves also helped mask the taste of drinking years-old barrel water.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#75

Post by mywittyname »

hnlmorg wrote: post #15
refactor_master wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But humans have been cooking stuff for thousands and thousands of years to improve nutritional value and kill off bacteria. Why would water be an exception?

Bacteria wasn’t known about thousand of years ago. Nor were nutrients (in the sense that we know it now). There are a plethora of other reasons food might have been cooked, not least of all being flavour. The fact that it also killed bacteria would have been an accidental benefit. Also a lot of food actually loses nutrients when cooked.

> Bacteria wasn’t known about thousand of years ago. Nor were nutrients (in the sense that we know it now).

And yet, processed like nixtamalization (the processed used to make the nutrients in maize available to humans) were discovered over 3000 years ago.

If ancient humans figured that complex process out, they certainly would have been able to figure out that boiling water made it safer to drink, even if they didn't know why. They'd probably just claim it killed the evil spirits or pleased the water god and have been happy with that explanation.

If someone is going to go through the process of boiling water, they might as well throw some stuff in there and turn it into soup/tea/broth/stew/whatever so that it tastes nice and makes you less hungry.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#76

Post by jeltz »

scarby2 wrote: post #40
closewith wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have diarrhoea a lot today, in developed countries with stable access to clean water and food. If anything, people massively underestimate the amount of diarrhoea premodern living involved.

>People have diarrhoea a lot today, in developed countries with stable access to clean water and food My personal experience suggests it's pretty uncommon. Maybe once every few years, and I eat all sorts of questionable things.

I also almost never have it but I would never presume my experience to be iniversal.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#77

Post by jeltz »

coldtea wrote: post #22

> As it happens, drinking water was commonplace throughout history. We have to remember that the notion that water could carry diseases is a fairly modern one No, it's anything but new. People in the past might not know about viruses and bacteria and such, but they very well knew about clean vs dirty water, the dangers of some animal corpse upstream, and many other such things... Ancient people had knowledge from exp…

Yeah, otherwise why would well poisoning be an ancient practice?

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#78

Post by watwut »

legitster wrote: post #63
cardanome wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, people drank water. But (especially in urban settings) they drank A LOT of low abv drinks. The vast majority of people in the medieval period did NOT live in cities. Furthermore the cities that did exists where way less densely populated and would more look like bigger villages to the modern eye. It is the modern world with it's industrialization and high population density that has the problem of getting safe…

While cities were smaller, I think people forget the inverse, which is that rural areas were much more densely populated. The farms were very small, required lots of labor, and were always close to the manor of a lord or parish. Which almost invariably had a bakery, brewery, and a well present. These services were very convenient to the average peasant, and I was surprised to learn how few medieval homes even had a h…

> Even the most crystal clear stream will have some sort of wild animal refuse in it that could leave you sick for days.

When you are local never ever moving out of place you do know what is upstream or in well. This "had no idea cows are up there" thing is modern hiker problem.

> the average person's distaste for drinking plain water is somewhat universal across time and cultures and might very well be a human adaptation.

There is absolutely nothing universal about that. Instead, drinking water seems to be universal accross cultures.

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#79

Post by [deleted] »

legitster wrote: post #3

I feel like some of these debunkings need debunking! I don't think anyone is truly arguing that medieval people never drank water. But they did drink beer in quantities that would be untenable today. The author is also muddling points - medieval people didn't have to understand microbiology to know that beer was safer to drink. And it was! Not only would the brewer have access to better water, it would be boiled as p…

[deleted]

Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)

#80

Post by legitster »

cardanome wrote: post #73
legitster wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While cities were smaller, I think people forget the inverse, which is that rural areas were much more densely populated. The farms were very small, required lots of labor, and were always close to the manor of a lord or parish. Which almost invariably had a bakery, brewery, and a well present. These services were very convenient to the average peasant, and I was surprised to learn how few medieval homes even had a h…

Having access to fresh water is not the same as saying any puddle of water was 100% safe. You bring up traveling when the vast majority of people did not travel. At all. Maybe to the next market if we talk later medieval period but that was it really. (I do use bottled water when traveling because I am only used to the local bacteria and it is easy to get sick at first when going to a new country.) As you write most…

If we both went into a time machine, and had to make the choice, I think both of us would still end up drinking the small-beer over even the most pristine local water.

But regardless, this is still not a strong argument that we need to "debunk" the history as the original author is trying to do. We have written primary sources from the dawn of writing until the modern temperance movements in the 1800s that all basically say the same thing - humans in any agricultural society ended up supplying the majority of their hydration from prepared sources of water. Access to clean water was about bathing, preparing food or drink, and the occasional drink of water.

Regardless of how safe their water was or was not to drink, medieval people still ended up drinking small-beer a majority of the time if they could help it.

Post reply on HN