[peterwwillis]

They do have some antimicrobial effects, but the "made it safe to drink water because nobody in the world could find clean drinking water until the 19th century" idea is a myth. Mainly people drank different things for different purposes. Water was clarifying, ale, whisky and tea were fortifying (beer was basically a source of calories), wine got you closer to the gods, coffee basically got you high / was an energy drink. Tea was the most popular socially-stimulating drink until coffee supplanted it (and in Muslim nations you couldn't drink alcohol)

[NeedMoreTea]

Except it's not a myth. For centuries mead, ale or small (low alcohol) beer were the standard drinks throughout the day, occasionally cider from crab and wild apples for the poorest. Wine for those with a little more means. Tea and coffee were for the wealthy until the 19th century, and something to add the drug of choice, sugar, to. Something for the great and the good in the tea rooms and coffee houses of London, until they arrived in huge quantities bringing prices down to commodity level.

Awareness of microbes, boiling for sterility, and water treatment was a long time coming. Water was clean if far enough upstream, or you had a pristine well. In towns and cities, forget it. :)

[peterwwillis]

This appears to be focused on post-15th century America and England; I was talking about world history, where each of these drinks' use predates Western social interpretations. But you're right that economic status often dictated social behavior, and so different things were drank by different social strata, but often because that's just what a person of that social class would do. Tea was originally treated as a very high social strata drink, but by the 18th century nearly all colonial americans were drinking it, up until the revolution supplanted it with alternatives like coffee.

Cities and towns have often historically been located next to rivers not only for transportation, but for agriculture, to remove waste, and for people to drink it. In order to have a "city" you have to solve the transportation of waste, which involves getting in water, and evidence for this goes back well before 3,000BC. The locations for cities were often chosen for good water quality, or avoided due to poor water quality. If water wasn't nearby, they'd pipe it in, and it they couldn't do that, they'd dig wells, often hundreds of em. In Rome, access to water completely transformed the idea of a city and built the biggest one in history up to that point. Cities often had not only public wells, but also fountains specifically for both drinking and hand-washing.

Some famous cities in history had poor access to water, and as they grew they suffered due to a lack of sanitation and clean water. But that has nothing to do with who drank what or for what purpose. All societies have drank different things for different reasons, but almost never due to an inability to get drinking water.

Even today, remote villages that are barely touched by modern man don't boil water or drink alcohol or tea. They just drink straight-up water, and 100,000 years of evolution has proved the idea that we figured out how not to die from it.

[NeedMoreTea]

Not at all. Where you solve the transportation of waste and getting in water through the river, only the most upstream city was getting potable water, downstream was after washing and waste went in. Wells frequently went down to a polluted or at least unsafe water table. Wells out of the towns and cities were generally safer. Few if any towns were the sole town on a river.

Tea was initially an elite drink in China, the expense in part explaining the rise of the rituals and ceremonies (and lots of equipment) surrounding it. Much the same happened with coffee.

Rome was indeed an exception thanks to their development and aqueducts, but that potable water was coming from well outside the city. In the outlying regions of the empire, without that infrastructure, wine seems to have been the usual, and water for bathing.

Remote enough is akin to upstream enough -- with no shite, washing and other pollutants, getting potable water from a remote spring or well is perfectly feasible.