What did people drank before the introduction of modern beverages/drinks? I get that they drank water, juices, wine, etc but what was the most average thing?
Did most europeans really drink wine most of the times they had lunch or dinner? How about the rest of the world? I can't imagine people drinking always alcoholic beverages
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East Asians had tea for damn near anything.
>Brits think they have a "tea culture" because they drink tea at a specific time of the day.
>Meanwhile Shanghai Taxi Drivers carry thermos tank of the bloody stuff and its basically their water.
drinking is a fairly modern phenomena. The first quenchy boys were introduced to man by their ancestors, the orangutans. What man didn't know was, those cheeky orange cunts were actually repackaging their own urine and that's what early humans would consume after a long day's work. Hence, man developed a taste for piss and eventually created his own -- what we now call beer.
Ignore anyone who claims people drank alcohol to avoid germs. They're just parroting Victorian memes. Most people drank... water. If they had a job that involved hard physical work they may replace it with beer for the extra calories. The wealthy will drink wine, of varying strengths depending on the era and culture.
Why was everyone in the classical era drinking wine then?
Not disputing you, I know people in medieval times and after actually drank water, but wine seems to be the primary drink of antiquity, according to most sources.
How about fruit juices?
Because it tastes good.
Consider the lack of knowledge of sterilisation and access to truly airtight containers. How long is fruit juice going to stay juice before it starts fermentation?
I imagine it being made and consumed at the moment, like with oranges. I don't know, maybe you could have a tree and grab some while in season to make juice at lunch
Maybe some caribbean/polynesian peoples drank coconut milk, I don't know. It doesn't needs to be daily
Certainly possible, but such a petty thing there's unlikely to be a record until we get into the era of widespread literacy where it might appear in a diary.
Wait, is this real?
>alcohol was originally repackaged monkey piss
What do you think?
People in France nowadays drink almost exclusively water during a normal day, and perhaps a glass of wine at dinner to go with the meal.aI know that people in some country drink almost no water but only juices and soda, which baffles me. My grandmother told me they used to drink a lot of very weak cider when she was young, as water in the countryside wasn't always drinkable.
So I supposed most people either drank weak alcoholics drinks (the alcohol killing the bacterias) or water from safe sources (wells, aqueducts..). Most people probably drank also a lot wine/beer/cider during the day,as working while drunk wasn't frowned upon.
>Most people drank... water.
people drank alcohol in the cities because cities have bad drinking water, at least in northern europe
i mean more beer than water btw
Did you intentionally ignore the first two sentences I wrote? Even in cities people drank water. Towns and cities went to incredible lengths to provide clean water for their citizens.
Honeyed wine, with some poured out for the gods.
This is disgusting, and I don't mean the insinuations of your post. Never post again.
Honey.
You would have to have a massive quantity of alcohol in a beverage before it provides any sterilisation properties. Beer and wine already dehydrate you, but to have enough alcohol to sterilise a drink it would need to be more like whiskey or vodka. Anyone trying to live like that would be dead within days.
>Because it tastes good.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. The "premodern people drank alcohol to kill the germs!" is a myth, yeah, but it is true that in a lot of classical societies, the water ... sucked. Hold your horses, stop arguing; not because it was filthy and polluted, just because water (especially in many areas of Greece) simply wasn't/isn't that plentiful, and not all pipes/aqueducts/cisterns are created equal. When you don't have that many water sources to choose from, collecting it and getting it from point A to point B without grit getting mixed in isn't trivial. There is an argument that can be made that wine was so ubiquitous partly because it made the water more palatable - not safer, it was perfectly safe already, just more pleasant to drink.
That said, a lot of people overstate this, and of course the idea that medieval peoples drank beer because the water was unsafe is just flatly untrue.
Citation needed.
13% is sufficient to stop yeast.
Kvass
Kefir
Milk
Kvass is a traditional Slavic fermented beverage commonly made from rye bread,[1] known in many Eastern European countries and especially in Ukraine and Russia as black bread. The colour of the bread used contributes to the colour of the resulting drink. It is classified as a non-alcoholic drink by Russian standards, as the alcohol content from fermentation is typically low (0.5–1.0%).[2][3] It may be flavoured with fruits such as strawberries and raisins, or with herbs such as mint.[4]
Kvass has been a common drink in Eastern Europe since at least the Middle Ages, comparable with other ancient fermented grain beverages including beer brewed from barley by the ancient Egyptians, the pombe or millet beer of Africa, the so-called rice wines of Asia, the chicha made with corn or cassava by the natives of the Americas.[9] Kvass was invented by the Slavs and became the most popular among East Slavs.[10]
The word "kvass" was first mentioned in the Primary Chronicle, in the description of events of the year 996, following the Christianization of the Kievan Rus'.[11] According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary the first mention of kvass in an English text took place sometime around 1553.[12][13] In Russia, under Peter the Great, it was the most common non-alcoholic drink in every class of society. William Tooke, describing Russian drinking habits in 1799, stated that "The most common domestic drink is quas, a liquor prepared from pollard, meal, and bread, or from meal and malt, by an acid fermentation. It is cooling and well-tasted."[14]
Sorry to go off topic, but what the hell is yeast? Where does it come from, how is it gathered? I keep looking for answers and keep getting "yeast is a single-celled organism used as a raising agent wheat products...bla, bla." Is it a kind of fungus that grows on wheat? I'm really confused.
>no mention of posca
I make myself a glass of it a few times a week. It taste great and isn’t unhealthy, I don’t drink soda or alcohol so every once in a while I drink it to have a change from plain water.
It's the fungus that makes your beer alcoholic.
Romans drank watered down wine everyday.
I love kvass too bad you can only get it in eastren europe.
There's fungi all around you from the microscopic to the visible. On your skin and hair, on walls and every surface.
It's only when it's in the right conditions for it you see it bloom and make a place dangerous.
There's ways to fuck up storing rice that will kill you. People have been gathering and storing grain for millenia, so of course some fool is going to try fermented grain alcohol eventually.
hehehe I guess so. And as Jonathan Swift once said, "He was a brave man that first ate an oyster."
The average European drank more beer than "water" in the Middle Ages. It was ubiquitous and cheap.
Kvas is great.
Watered-down wine is called bevanda in Dalmatia (it comes from Italy) and is always drunk with lunch or supper.
>Posca
Forgot about that
Small beer.
Weak beer or grog was very common because it was sterile but not too intoxicating.
Beer
Pulling this out of my ass but, considering making juice out of a fruit normally involves throwing away the pulp and such, most people probably chose to just not waste food
Monks in an English abbey in the 12th century were rationed a gallon of beer a day. While it was pretty weak, I can imagine them being at least somewhat intoxicated regularly.
Fruits were available fresh for only a brief time, and it takes a lot of fruits to make a little juice.
eh, it was small beer, just buzzed.