alt Hacker NewsThe thing is that water was not really safe to drink, no matter what these people may tell you. There's a reason there are huge aid campaigns all over the Third World to ensure people have access to safe water. Some water is relatively safe to drink, but even in the wild you can get giardasis and other problems from drinking it. The more human beings are nearby, the more of an issue it becomes.
In the time before cars transporting water was not easy, so people usually had to get water from the nearest source. Wells were not necessarily safe, especially because both humans and animals tended to shit pretty much everywhere. Even today well water is not necessarily safe.
But did people know that drinking water was unsafe? Evidence on that is contradictory. They were certainly aware that some kinds of water was safer than others.
And was this why people drank beer instead? Not clear at all. It's completely possible they did it simply because they wanted to, although it was seen as healthy. That was because of the calories, though.
In many places they did not drink beer, however. Scotland and Norway drank blaand (a whey drink), and Eastern Europe drank a lot of kvass. Fermented birch sap and a drink from juniper berries were common, too. Not to mention a weird drink known as rostdrikke/taar/etc depending on language (takes too long to explain).
What I find interesting about this is that nobody seems to care to really dive into the details and describe the situation as it actually was. I realize it's a lot of work, but still.
Replies
Getting these people drinking water is hard, maybe even harder than brewing beer. Is there any campaigns to get africans to drink a gallon of beer a day?
I don't really get your point. Water isn't necessarily safe now, either. Just like now, you boil water if you are aware of risk. Just like now, people communicated about when to boil, where to gather water, skinning people alive for messing with the water (well that has perhaps improved a little bit), militaries would regularly poison water sources. And of course, you can find people today who willingly take dumb risks for no explicable reason. All of your uncertainty applies just as much to today as it did in the past.
Water has always been, is, and will be uncertain. But there's so much evidence of awareness of this that speculating people didn't drink water is absurd. Not to mention keeping water sources clean gets much harder with high populations we see today—we have roughly the same amount of water that we did before
Btw, you casually ACCEPTED that people drank beer instead of water when we know this is false. Even on ships (as you would know if you clicked through the askhistorians link under the top of the thread) ships did carry (a lot of!) water—it just wasn't listed as rationed unless supplies ran low. This was both drunk directly and added to the beer to produce the gallon allocated.
Ie you might follow the same rhetorical technique to say "why do you beat your wife? Well, the evidence is uncertain.", even if we have clear evidence you don't beat your wife.
You'd really have to find evidence that people explicitly avoided water to make such a claim. In all situations I can think of there was either certainty it was not potable (ie seawater, poisoned well, flooding, etc) and being unable to boil it.