With some perspective then, Medieval Europe's relationship to alcohol really isn't all that wild. Considering the tolerance they'd build over time and the low ABV, most people were probably rarely drunk.
In fact, in the early republic, Americans drank quantities we would consider astounding today. In 1790, we consumed an average of 5.8 gallons of absolute alcohol annually for each drinking-age individual. By 1830, that figure rose to 7.1 gallons!
Yes. Alcohol, particularly beer, was an integral part of the diet across the ancient and medieval world, providing a substantial portion of caloric intake and nutrients.
Did medieval people drink alcohol instead of water?
Ultimately, the narrative that medieval men and women chose to drink ale over water was indeed a myth, but it did have some weight. As the quality of water declined, they continually chose to substitute water for ale, until movements to source cleaner drinking water arose.
So was everyone drunk back then? Well, kind of. The most common drink was homemade ale, also known as table beer or small beer, which was probably between 1 — 3% ABV. Good beer, like today, would have been more like 4–6%, and mead would have been about 10%, comparable with wines of the day.
People in the Middle Ages did, of course, also drink a lot of wine and beer. (Generally, beer was more prevalent in Northern Europe, while wine flowed freely to the south.) It wasn't necessarily about thirst, however.
History » Medieval Life » What Foods did the Medieval Peasants Eat? The peasants' main food was a dark bread made out of rye grain. The peasants often kept chickens that provided them with fresh eggs. Fish was plentiful and could be obtained from the rivers and streams.
Centuries ago, drinking beer was safer than drinking the water, and beer was regarded as safe, nutritious and caloric, even appropriate for small children. Beer became increasingly popular in Germany, especially after the enactment of the Beer Purity Law.
Medieval people weren't stupid; they didn't drink water that looked or smelled bad, and tradesmen that used water -- such as tanning -- faced hefty fines if they polluted the town's drinking supply [source: O'Neill].
Men in Romania are, by and large, the heaviest drinkers on the planet. The average Romanian male drinks 27.3 liters, roughly seven and a half gallons, per year. It's not just the men in Romania that boast such high numbers.
Chemical analyses recently confirmed that the earliest alcoholic beverage in the world was a mixed fermented drink of rice, honey, and hawthorn fruit and/or grape. The residues of the beverage, dated ca. 7000–6600 BCE, were recovered from early pottery from Jiahu, a Neolithic village in the Yellow River Valley.
Vikings used to brew both strong and weak beer and mead for different occasions. Weak beer was used as a water replacement to quench thirst and was deemed suitable for children, whereas the stronger brewed beverages were held in an adult-only space on the proverbial top shelf, reserved for special occasions.
Compared to beer consumption, liquor had an approximately two and a half times greater effect on biological aging. Daily consumption of liquor for five years was associated with a four-month acceleration in biological aging, so if you drink liquor daily for 15 years, your biological age will be one year older.
Blackout Wednesday. Blackout Wednesday (also known as Drinksgiving) refers to binge drinking on the night before the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States.
That idea has been challenged by researchers who recreated a typical Tudor brew and found that it was five per cent alcohol, making it as potent as today's premium lagers.
Beer and mead are associated with the Viking period. Beer was made from barley. It was consumed in large quantities, because water could be dangerous to drink in the Viking period.
Beer hasn't always been called beer ! In medieval times, this drink was named in a wide variety of ways. Cervoise, gruit, barley wine or sikaru, the way beer was called varied greatly in the Kingdom of France. Please note that sikaru refers, in the Akkadian language, to beer.
As one of the oldest alcohol-based beverages, beer's many stages of development go back to early times. But today's beer production has been perfected in Germany. For over 500 years, the German Purity Law has ensured clearly regulated ingredients: Water, malt, hops, yeast - and nothing else. Anything else is not beer.
How many calories did a medieval peasant need every day?
One typical estimate is that an adult peasant male needed 2,900 calories (12,000 kJ) per day, and an adult female needed 2,150 calories (9,000 kJ). Both lower and higher estimates have been proposed.
Peasants would take their dishes to the local stream and scrub it with a cloth. If no stream existed they would go to the well, get a bucket of water and scrub the dishes with that. As for the nobility, servants would do something similar, but they probably used some kind of soap.
Barley – and later wheat – were staples of the Anglo-Saxon diet. They would have been dried and milled into flour: bread was served with almost every meal and remained a core part of diets in England until the arrival and subsequent cultivation of the potato in the 16th century.
