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.
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 ..."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
"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 ..."