[OfSanguineFire]

The link makes the claim that only small ale was drunk in medieval times because water was considered unhealthy, but I thought that was an urban myth?

From the depiction of the home as the woman’s sphere in medieval Northern European literature, it isn’t surprising that brewing was women’s work along with cooking in general.

[dmurray]

> it isn’t surprising that brewing was women’s work along with cooking in general.

What's interesting here is precisely that brewing beer was a domestic job (and therefore women's work), in a way that baking bread, for example, was not.

> most villages depended on local bakers to prepare bread ... Most households alternated between making their own ale and buying from and selling to neighbors

[ecshafer]

From my understanding, ovens were often large communal or commercial ovens in the middle ages and renaissance periods. The poor wouldn't have had an oven in their home.

[Tanoc]

Very much so. Most homes would have had either a fire pit or a hearth. It was too resource intensive to design something just for cooking when you could also use it for heat, light, and warding off bugs.

[globular-toast]

> in a way that baking bread, for example, was not.

This probably just comes down to availability of equipment. Bread making in the home has been common in places like England and India for a long time. In places like Austria and France the preference is for bread that is best from special ovens that people don't have at home, but even there people would make things like brioche at home.

[Scaevolus]

Baking in large ovens has massive, obvious economies of scale in terms of fuel use per gram of bread. It's very natural to become centralized.

Brewing is more efficient in terms of labor as you scale up to larger containers, but it's less extreme.

[tgv]

https://history.howstuffworks.com/medieval-people-drink-beer...

https://gizmodo.com/no-medieval-people-didnt-drink-booze-to-...

No idea what the concensus is, but it also doesn't make sense that everyone drank beer instead of water. Young children almost certainly didn't drink beer. And I expect it to have been out of reach for large parts of the population: cost and availability of ingredients.

[rsynnott]

AIUI consensus is that people did drink water but also quite a lot of beer.

"Young children almost certainly didn't drink beer." - wanna bet?

> In his A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education, in Boarding Schools published 1797, writer Erasmus Darwin agreed that "For the drink of the more robust children water is preferable, and for the weaker ones, small beer ..."

[mewpmewp2]

To be honest if you are unaware of the bad effects of beer or how addiction works in general, it seems like a thing that you would get so easily addicted to.

If I had a different knowledge set and easy access to beer, perhaps I would just drink it daily.

Without water I imagine there are going to be massive hangovers though.

[wongarsu]

Common beers back then were very different from today's beer. Beer was more of a liquid meal, with lots of calories and about half the alcohol content of a Coors Light.

[TSiege]

Honestly that sounds kinda awesome to me. I'd love to try it

[bell-cot]

The quoted bit specifies small beer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_beer#History

[7thaccount]

I assume these beers were pretty low ABV. Addiction to alcohol probably was pretty common and perhaps preferable to dysentery.

[878654Tom]

Yes, this is called Small Beer or Table Beer in Belgium. It goes as low as 1% and was very normal in schools and at homes before clean water was a common thing.

It still is a very popular beer to drink while you eat but children don't consume it anymore. My father did tell me that when he was younger (1970-1980) they still drank it at the table in his school.

[kwhitefoot]

I don't know when the rules changed but when I was a child in England in the sixties anything less than 2% could be sold to anyone, it wasn't regarded as properly alcoholic. The brand I remember is Top Deck Shandy, half and half lemonade and light beer.

[OfSanguineFire]

I specifically said small beer, and that is something that has been commonly served to children in various places even into modern times. Your claim that beer was too costly also seems to be based on how beer is made and sold today: back then, beer was made without hops, and grain was available to medieval peasants because they were growing it themselves. A sort of beer was drunk by the working classes in Ancient Egypt, it has never been an elite drink.

[User23]

Many people don’t realize that yeast leavened bread is about 1% alcohol and as high as 2%. Obviously we let children eat it. Why would small beer at the same percentage be a problem?

[elcomet]

Alcohol evaporates when the bread cooks

[jameshart]

Seems like the consensus is that some remains.

A lot of online sources cite a 1926 study that said bread can have ‘up to 1.9%’ alcohol content. This more recent study from 1998 suggests that 0.4-0.6% ethanol by mass is more typical: https://auventdunord.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/food-alco...

[User23]

Some of it, but not all of it or even the majority[1]. For reference some breads bake in as little as 20 minutes so a fair bit of alcohol remains.

[1] https://www.isu.edu/news/2019-fall/no-worries-the-alcohol-bu...

[groestl]

And a very ripe banana can have an ABV value of 0.4%.

[jameshart]

That sugar in fruit gradually turns into alcohol should not be a surprise to anyone. Really ‘ripe’ grape juice can have an ABV of over 14% :)

[groestl]

;) It hardly resembles the fruit anymore though :)

[CalRobert]

And yet there are people alive today who enjoyed a glass of wine as a schoolchild in France. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/french-children-wine-at-sc...

[tokai]

What a peak HN comment - authoritative and wrong. Kids most definitely did drink alcohol.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110306073320/http://digital.li...

[tengbretson]

What was the authoritative part?

[tokai]

>certainly didn't drink beer

>out of reach for large parts of the population

Claims that the poster base on nothing at all, but still claim it in a peremptory fashion.

[tengbretson]

> almost certainly

> I expect it to have been out of reach

Neither of these statements are claims at all.

[tokai]

Are you serious?

[OfSanguineFire]

I assume the GP was chuckling at how the OP offered two authoritative (well, not really) links to support a claim in my top-level post, but then went on to make an erroneous claim himself.

[tokai]

No not at all. Its is true and well documented claim that people didn't drink alcohol at all times instead of water. The links and what he is claiming is not overlapping.

[beastman82]

This. The irony is too much

[VoodooJuJu]

Young children did drink it, and it's still served to children today in Finland: https://www.brewingnordic.com/farmhouse-ales/small-beer-call...

[mewpmewp2]

I somewhat remember my parents offering me a drink to try out when I was 6 or 7. Not sure if it's a made up hint of memory.

It definitely wasn't something frequent or high dosage though.

I actively started drinking with peers around the age of 12 - 14. That was in secrecy from parents though, asking homeless to buy us the goods.

[gostsamo]

My parents definitely offered me alcohol when I was a child. The hard alcohol was mostly to show me how it burns the throat and not to try it, while beer was bitter but okay for a sip or two to feel grownup. Alcohol also had a medicinal use in the family, though I'm not sure about the medicinal effect.

After I was 14 and more, alcohol was introduced on more regular bases, but not with social pressure to drink, just was available as an option.

Decades later, I'm just a social drinker.

[kwhitefoot]

I had essentially the same experience. I'm 67 now. My grandmother used to give me a miniature of De Kuyper's Cherry Brandy for Christmas from when I was six or seven, I made it last until after New Year!