[HN Gopher] Until the 14th century women dominated the field of ...
___________________________________________________________________
Until the 14th century women dominated the field of beer brewing
Author : beardyw
Score : 97 points
Date : 2023-12-06 11:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (daily.jstor.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (daily.jstor.org)
| thriftwy wrote:
| ...in a 500 mile radius blurb around Blue Banana.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I'm sure men dominated the field of beer drinking.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| 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.
| tgv wrote:
| 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.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Alcohol evaporates when the bread cooks
| jameshart wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| And a very ripe banana can have an ABV value of 0.4%.
| jameshart wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| ;) It hardly resembles the fruit anymore though :)
| rsynnott wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I assume these beers were pretty low ABV. Addiction to
| alcohol probably was pretty common and perhaps preferable
| to dysentery.
| 878654Tom wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bell-cot wrote:
| The quoted bit specifies _small_ beer.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_beer#History
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Honestly that sounds kinda awesome to me. I'd love to try
| it
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| tokai wrote:
| What a peak HN comment - authoritative _and_ wrong. Kids most
| definitely did drink alcohol.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20110306073320/http://digital.li.
| ..
| tengbretson wrote:
| What was the authoritative part?
| beastman82 wrote:
| This. The irony is too much
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| tokai wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| > almost certainly
|
| > I expect it to have been out of reach
|
| Neither of these statements are claims at all.
| CalRobert wrote:
| 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...
| dmurray wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| globular-toast wrote:
| > 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.
| tiahura wrote:
| I had a little wife, the prettiest ever seen, She washed all the
| dishes and kept the house clean. She went to the mill to fetch me
| some flour, She brought it home in less than an hour. She baked
| me my bread, she brewed me my beer, She sat by the fire and made
| good cheer.
| ConfusedDog wrote:
| I had a little wife, and I am in jail. She didn't know how to
| cook, nor did any chores. She went to the nail salon, and
| brought a new fellow. She took my house, I drank in sorrow.
| CalRobert wrote:
| And we have them to thank for witches' hats!
|
| """ They wore the tall, pointy hats so that their customers could
| see them in the crowded marketplace. They transported their brew
| in cauldrons. And those who sold their beer out of stores had
| cats not as demon familiars, but to keep mice away from the
| grain. Some argue that iconography we associate with witches,
| from the pointy hat to the cauldron, originated from women
| working as master brewers. """
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/women-used-dominate-b...
| felideon wrote:
| Or not... see the editor's note.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Well that's what I get for remembering a thing I read a few
| years back, googling for a source, and then not checking my
| new source carefully.
| sgt101 wrote:
| I like to think that it was this thing:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_hat
|
| Maybe some ancient folk memory!!
| duped wrote:
| It's probably a mix of sources. Famously, Goya's _Witches
| Flight_ (0) shows the three witches wearing the same hat
| decorated with flames that Inquisitors forced their victims to
| wear (1) (2) (the flames showing they were to be burned for not
| repenting).
|
| (0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witches%27_Flight
|
| (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capirote
|
| (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanbenito
| cardanome wrote:
| > "Ale was virtually the sole liquid consumed by medieval
| peasants," writes Judith M. Bennett in a chapter in the edited
| volume, Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe. "Water was
| considered to be unhealthy, [so] each household required a large
| and steady supply of this perishable item."
|
| This myth again? You don't even need to know medieval history to
| figure out it is bullshit.
|
| Think about it logically, you can not brew bear from water that
| is contaminated in the first place. Garbage in garbage out. If
| you have a safe water source, well just drink water. Also, we are
| talking about medieval beer with maybe 2 percent alcohol, how the
| hell is that going to help? That percentage is way too low to do
| any good.
|
| Obviously people were mostly drinking water. I mean think of all
| the calories, the logistics and all. It is true though that
| households would brew their own bear for consumption. Export of
| bear would develop in the late medieval period. It is also true,
| that weak 2% ale was consumed a lot, just not as much a water.
|
| I guess people just really like the idea of medieval people being
| shitfaced all the time.
|
| Edd: Also most places where not very densely populated, even
| cities were not compared to modern time. So while water safety
| was a concern, it was not as big as one might think.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| The idea that people only drank beer because it was safe and
| water wasn't is a myth, yes.
|
| The idea that premodern and early modern people _considered_
| water unsafe is not, though. You can see this view all over the
| european primary record, and it 's very clear that in many
| areas and for much of premodern history people _preferred_
| fermented drinks when they had access to the choice.
|
| > Think about it logically, you can not brew bear from water
| that is contaminated in the first place.
|
| This is also not strictly true, depending on what sort of
| contamination you're talking about. Heavy metal or contemporary
| chemical contamination won't be affected by the brewing
| process, but it will kill parasites for example. Bacterial
| contamination varies by the specifics and degree, but you may
| be _better_ off having brewed it.
|
| Securing clean springs and wells was a high priority for people
| all through history. Brewing is part of a range of techniques
| and technologies that were used to varying extents when they
| weren't able to.
|
| "They drank beer instead of water because it was safe" is a
| myth but also so is "water was safe and there was no advantage
| to drinking beer."
| cardanome wrote:
| No one is saying water was always safe, you are making a
| straw man so you can do a both sides thing.
|
| People where obviously worried about water safety, yes.
| Fermented drinks are not guaranteed to be safe though. The 2%
| isn't going to do much.
|
| The brewing process helps a bit but you you can just boil
| water after all.
|
| The question is not whether water safety was a concern, it
| certainly was but whether people brew beer MAINLY for safety
| reasons. I think it is safe(!) to assume they brew beer
| because they liked drinking bear.
| mellinoe wrote:
| > The brewing process helps a bit but you you can just boil
| water after all.
|
| Was this widely known?
| lupusreal wrote:
| No, not before Louis Pasteur. It's likely that people
| knew brewed beverages were safer but didn't know why, and
| didn't know they could skip most of the brewing process
| and simply boil the water.
| cardanome wrote:
| They didn't knew about bacteria and wouldn't have had the
| theory to explain why it would help.
|
| Boiling water wasn't really that necessary because the
| medieval period was sparsely populated and people had
| access to safe water sources. I am sure they would have
| figured out boiling water if their survival dependent on
| it.
|
| We know that People generally knew about basic hygiene
| and applied it even if they lacked modern theory.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > They didn't knew about bacteria and wouldn't have had
| the theory to explain why it would help.
|
| That didn't stop say, the sterilization effects of silver
| from being widely known and spread across myths.
|
| Fewer people got sick when they drank from silver cups
| and silver stuff. They didn't know a thing about
| bacteria, but enough people drinking from enough
| different cups and suddenly a pattern emerges that forms
| the basis of a myth or legend.
|
| > We know that People generally knew about basic hygiene
| and applied it even if they lacked modern theory.
|
| Soap and its effects to destroy common pathogens (viruses
| and bacteria) wasn't known... but "Hygiene" became a
| thing as early as 400BC Roman periods because of similar
| patterns.
|
| The theories we have today summarize centuries or
| millennia of collective experience. Not the other way
| around. We don't need to understand bacteria to discover
| how useful soap, boiling, or silver/anti-bacterial
| surfaces are. Instead, we use our knowledge of "silver
| prevents sickness", "soap prevents sickness", and
| "boiling prevents sickness" to help us discover a grand
| theory of microorganisms / bacteria.
| qwytw wrote:
| Hippocrates did suggest this approach of purifying water
| so at least educated doctors would've have certainly
| known that. Also it's not exactly rocket science most
| people would have probably understood that to some
| extent. At least that boiling removes "bad" smells and
| improves the taste (that's what Hippocrates said at
| least, not how effective that is).
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Since you can read my mind I don't think I have anything
| else to contribute here.
| dimask wrote:
| > The 2% isn't going to do much.
|
| 2% of what? If you mean alcohol, that is not how
| fermentation works for preserving food/drinks.
|
| Using beneficial/harmless cultures to outcompete harmful
| microorganisms, which is how fermentation is used to
| preserve food/drinks, has been the main way of preserving
| food across cultures. Especially before fridge, canning and
| and other modern industrial techniques have been possible.
| Yeah I do not get the "beer instead of water" thing, but I
| can imagine there could be a lot of situations that beer
| could be important to have as a water source, like
| traveling distances.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| > Think about it logically, you can not brew bear from water
| that is contaminated in the first place.
|
| My assumption is that the contamination is biological, which
| would be fixed by the long boil required in brewing. Even with
| resistance to the local microflora, water was probably more
| likely to cause disease than a boiled derivative like beer.
|
| > I guess people just really like the idea of medieval people
| being shitfaced all the time.
|
| I've heard that the beer made then, maybe especially for
| consumption by peasants, had a low ABV by today's standards.
| High alcohol beer is a waste of grain if the goal is a
| slightly-more-antiseptic-than-water beverage.
| cardanome wrote:
| > I've heard that the beer made then, maybe especially for
| consumption by peasants, had a low ABV by today's standards.
| High alcohol beer is a waste of grain if the goal is a
| slightly-more-antiseptic-than-water beverage.
|
| You might want to reread what I wrote, yes it was only like 2
| percent. The problem is, how anti-septic is 2% beer? It is
| not. It doesn't really help in any meaningful way.
|
| If you want stable beer that you can transport over longer
| distances you want higher alcohol concentration but then
| again higher alcohol concentration isn't exactly great for
| keeping people hydrated.
| triceratops wrote:
| > The problem is, how anti-septic is 2% beer?
|
| It feels like you're deliberately not reading or addressing
| all the answers telling you that boiling water to make beer
| is what made it safe.
| qwytw wrote:
| Well if alcohol itself is irrelevant why did they not
| simply boil the water before drinking it without making a
| beer from it?
|
| I think the fact that people just like to drink beer is a
| much better explanation of why did they drink so much of
| it. The "safer to drink" part was secondary at best.
| triceratops wrote:
| Did they know boiling water made it safe to drink? Or did
| they only notice that drinking beer caused less diarrhea
| than drinking water?
|
| I'm not denying that the tastiness of beer was a factor.
| qwytw wrote:
| Hypocrates specifically recommended doctors to boil and
| filter water before giving to patients to drink.
|
| Ancient Egytpians, Indians and Romans understood that
| boiling makes water safer to drink as well (Galen even
| suggested using boiling water to sterilize surgical
| instruments).
|
| IMHO it makes perfect sense in the context of the miasma
| theory (if people thought that "bad smells" were the main
| vector spreading diseases and illnesses and boiling water
| removes bad smells, improves taste etc. then it also must
| have made it safer to drink).
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| Beer is boiled, which destroys most pathogens you might worry
| about. You could boil plain water and be safe, but that wasn't
| understood until later, see pasteurization.
|
| A vessel inoculated with yeast and other brewing microorganisms
| will make it harder for other microorganisms to take root.
| They'll be outcompeted by the large existing population. So a
| barrel of beer will tend to stay healthier than a barrel of
| water.
|
| If someone drank say, 100oz of 2% abv beer over the course of
| the day, that's equivalent to 2.5 pints of 5% beer - hardly
| enough to get shitfaced.
|
| Edit in response to your edit: density was lower but technology
| to manage density was less sophisticated as well. Providing
| clean water to a large population is a hard problem that people
| have had to solve lots of ways, and brewing is one of the
| solutions. Later, an infected city water pump led to the
| invention of modern epidemiology.
| dhritzkiv wrote:
| In addition, if hops (or other herbs) were used in the boil,
| the acids from the hops (what gives beer its bitter bite),
| even in small amounts, would provide anti-bacterial benefits
| to the beer.
| sudobash1 wrote:
| For the medieval period, it would have been other herbs.
| Hops are something of a later addition. I don't believe
| that they came into very widespread use until the
| reformation era.
| automatic6131 wrote:
| And at about 0.5% ABV you digest the alcohol at about the
| rate you can drink it (assuming you drink it at anything
| below a "competitive" rate. Just like, as much as you'd drink
| socially, or with a meal, or for rehydration)
| qwytw wrote:
| > You could boil plain water and be safe, but that wasn't
| understood until later
|
| Not sure that's true. We have evidence that ancient
| Egyptians, Greeks and Romans (and I assume other societies)
| understood that boiling water made it safer to drink. Basic
| sand/gravel filters.
|
| Hypocrates for instance described a method of boiling water
| and then filtering it through a cloth to purify it and remove
| "bad smells".
|
| To be fair even if you have no clue about bacteria it's not a
| particularly complex concept to understand. If for instance
| pre modern people truly drank beer because it was safer
| surely at some point one of them would've asked the question
| why is that the case?
| slabity wrote:
| > This myth again? You don't even need to know medieval history
| to figure out it is bullshit.
|
| I hate to be that guy, but do you have a source that backs this
| claim?
|
| "Think about it logically" doesn't really cut it.
| cardanome wrote:
| This is a good starting point with some good sources linked:
| https://leslefts.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-great-medieval-
| wat...
|
| By the way, this is the mainstream position among historians,
| it is only pop culture that hung up on the water myth.
| sophacles wrote:
| A significant portion of the examples in that link follow
| the form:
|
| This person is so holy that they drink water.
|
| The very fact that it was a sign of unusual holiness to
| drink water seems to undermine the point. It's like saying
| "in the 2020s people mostly didn't use cell phones. Look at
| this passage about a group called the Amish, see what I
| mean?".
| sophacles wrote:
| I don't think you're actually applying logic. Your priors make
| exactly no sense.
|
| As others have pointed out - boiling contaminated water
| decontaminates it... beer involves boiling.
|
| 2% alcohol content is plenty to help slow bacterial growth,
| making it keep longer.
|
| > I mean think of all the calories, the logistics and all
|
| Ok let's do that. In the pre-modern eras, calories were the
| thing almost everyone was focused on. Famine was common (famine
| is when lots of people starve to death), so any way of getting
| calories was good. Beer is made of malt, that is sprouted grain
| that is then heated to dry and cook it. Sprouted grain doesn't
| keep - it either becomes a plant or rots. Using it for beer
| makes good use of calories that would otherwise go to waste. NO
| one was worried about getting fat (in fact if you were lucky
| enough to get fat, it was a benefit - you're more likely to
| survie the next famine).
|
| > Obviously people were mostly drinking water... It is also
| true, that weak 2% ale was consumed a lot, just not as much a
| water.
|
| This is not obvious at all - do you have any good sources
| besides weak logic based on false assumptions?
| MisterTea wrote:
| > Think about it logically, you can not brew bear from water
| that is contaminated in the first place.
|
| I mean it's quite obvious you cannot brew an ursine creature
| from just water alone.
| triceratops wrote:
| Bears are 75% water so it'll get you most of the way there.
| imbnwa wrote:
| >I guess people just really like the idea of medieval people
| being shitfaced all the time.
|
| Dunno about medieval people being shitfaced, but it probably
| followed from the fact that in early America drinking was
| absolutely a problem. The Whiskey Tax was heavily backed by
| religious reformers as a de facto 'sin tax' cause there was so
| much drinking going on. The Prohibition/Temperance movement was
| about a hundred years old when it finally won legal prohibition
| in 1920.
|
| These weren't just neurotic Christian fundamentalists being
| annoying, average people were drinking around three and a half
| gallons of alcohol a year, and we're talking whiskey and rum
| here.[0]
|
| [0]https://daily.jstor.org/a-brief-history-of-drinking-alcohol/
| rurp wrote:
| Is drinking 3.5 gallons of whiskey or rum per year that big
| of a societal problem? That's only a little more than 1 oz
| per day. If someone is drinking to the point of disfunction I
| would expect their consumption to be a great deal more than
| that.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| First, it's amongst all people - so toddlers, kids and non-
| drinkers too. Second, it's pure alcohol count. Not 3,5
| gallons of whisky, but so much whisky that there was 3,5
| gallons of pure alcohol in it.
| rpmisms wrote:
| That's absolutely insane. Too bad prohibition created
| organized crime and gun control in the US.
| triceratops wrote:
| > I guess people just really like the idea of medieval people
| being shitfaced all the time.
|
| That seems unlikely on 2% beer while doing hard manual labor.
| neaden wrote:
| This isn't just wrong because of the beer thing, but people
| also drank a variety of herbal teas and other drinks, the most
| popular being a boiled barley drink. Just like now people
| prefer drinking something with more flavor then water.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I find these "believe it or not, women used to do stuff" articles
| weird. Women still do stuff. Why is it surprising that they used
| to do stuff too?
|
| The article starts with "As the old sexist saw goes, "Beer is a
| man's drink."" Who even says that? I honestly have never met a
| single person who would say that. I even got laid at a beer
| festival once. Is the author perhaps betraying their own
| preconceptions?
| havblue wrote:
| The mindset seems to result from careerism: that people define
| themselves according to the interesting and publicly recognized
| work that they do. In reality I suspect that people simply had
| no choice but to work according to their status and ability.
| It's just labor and there was plenty of it to go around. Why do
| we have to romanticize it?
| NoLsAfterMid wrote:
| So--beer was certainly the primary beverage, but people still
| drank water without boiling it (which is, after all, rather time
| and energy consuming and requires a ready fire).
|
| I have ready links to provide better context, and this is
| literally the most hated question on /r/AskHistorians, so I'm
| sure you could get rapid replies for follow-up questions. It's an
| _extremely_ useful resource to tap into to get a professional
| historian with training in historiography to weigh in on
| arbitrary questions.
|
| On the general claim of using alcohol to decontaminate water:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ol1h45/delet...
|
| On use of aqueducts in Britain to transport potable water:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/mnlf9n/when_...
|
| On general access to fresh water:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1svj1q/how_d...
|
| On understanding of germ theory in water:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/676bg6/befor...
|
| On poisoning wells:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6qljlt/when_...
|
| 2nd one on poisoning wells:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6kt7nh/poiso...
|
| Addressing beer directly:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bewpo/what_...
| ianburrell wrote:
| The article misses that in the period, ale and beer were
| different drinks. Ale was made with herbs. Hops, and the word
| beer, came later.
|
| The 14th century is about when hops and word beer starting taking
| over in England. I can't find evidence but I wouldn't be
| surprised if beer was brewed by men.
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