[HN Gopher] Beer on Board in the Age of Sail (2017)
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Beer on Board in the Age of Sail (2017)
Author : thunderbong
Score : 33 points
Date : 2025-04-23 06:42 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.library.si.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.library.si.edu)
| dddw wrote:
| No mention of sauerkraut ?
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I think it's important to point out that almost everyone drank
| beer and it wasn't because the water was bad. It was because they
| liked drinking beer.
|
| Our modern culture doesn't like the idea of people drinking beer
| all day so there has to be some scientific justification to make
| it acceptable to modern sensibilities.
|
| The percentage of alcohol required to preserve beer for long
| periods is too high for sailors to be drinking a gallon of it per
| day.
| jfforko4 wrote:
| "Beer" had like 1% of alcohol content. Just enough to keep it
| without bacteria.
|
| Drinking 2 month old stale untreated water... good luck with
| that.
|
| > they liked drinking beer
|
| Sailors were basically slaves. Nobody cared what they liked.
| But if crew dies from diarrhia, that is a big problem!
| oofManBang wrote:
| > Just enough to keep it without bacteria.
|
| Bacteria (and certainly viruses) can survive 80 proof liquor.
| 1% alcohol is going to have very little sterilization effect.
| xorcist wrote:
| It's not the alcohol that's supposed to kill bacteria, it's
| the long boil.
| oofManBang wrote:
| The boil _does_ kill the bacteria, but it 's not
| preserved _after_ the boil. At best it 's as sterile as
| water; at worse it spoils faster due to the abundance of
| nutrients.
| larsga wrote:
| First of all, many types of beer were historically not
| boiled. Quite a few still aren't. The mash, however,
| pasteurizes the beer.
|
| That, however, doesn't last forever. In the conditions of
| the 18th century or whatever, microorganisms will get
| into the beer after mashing/boiling, so the heat
| treatment only helps for a while. The fermentation really
| does protect the beer afterwards, but it's a combination
| of low pH, alcohol, low oxygen, little nutrients, CO2,
| etc. Hops also help against gram-positive bacteria.
| qwytw wrote:
| > Beer" had like 1% of alcohol content.
|
| How is that enough? A highly nutritious liquid made from
| grain is a quite perfect environment for all kind of bacteria
| and other stuff to grow and spread. Relatively clean water?
| Not so much.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Some sailors were basically slaves, but like most slaves,
| they required a minimum to prevent revolt, especially at sea
| where they vastly outnumbered commanding officers and there
| was no reinforcement.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| > "Beer" had like 1% of alcohol content. Just enough to keep
| it without bacteria.
|
| You need closer to 40% alcohol.
|
| > Nobody cared what they liked.
|
| Not in the British Navy. Food was very important to morale
| and they got a lot of it with the best quality they could
| manage. Meat every day was luxury few people could afford.
|
| Mutiny was a very real risk. That's why warships carried so
| many marines. Good food goes a long way to preventing this.
| larsga wrote:
| > "Beer" had like 1% of alcohol content.
|
| Beer has had a huge range of alcohol strengths, from
| Mesopotamia until today, so that statement is nonsensical.
|
| > Just enough to keep it without bacteria.
|
| 1% is not enough to keep bacteria from growing in a beer. In
| general, more alcohol means it will keep longer, but to be
| truly safe you need to go quite high. This is a pretty
| complex issue, though.
| oofManBang wrote:
| Anyone downvoting this comment is not understanding how common
| this myth is, or not bothering to google to verify their own
| understanding. It's by far the most asked-about myth on
| /r/askhistorians. Someone asked this under 24 hours ago:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k5ji8i/how_...
|
| But it comes up a good 2-5x a month. I really want to know
| where this understanding came from.
| larsga wrote:
| The 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.
| oofManBang wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| Beer was known to go bad on long voyages. So long as the beer
| held out though there was no scurvy.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Beer staying fresh seems like a proxy for voyage duration.
| Longer trips means more likely to have run out of
| beer/vitamin C sources. No beer probably means no dock where
| sailors could have consumed anything other than highly
| preserved food.
| larsga wrote:
| Beer does _not_ cure scurvy. Scurvy is caused by a lack of
| vitamin C, which is not in beer.
| rdj wrote:
| A caveat being and mentioned in the article, that sailors
| didn't have access to the safe water of lakes and streams, thus
| beer. And as someone mentions below, it's safer to drink low
| alcohol beer than months old (untreated) water. I can see why
| people jump to the conclusion that beer was safer than
| water...and it makes for good cocktail hour small talk.
| larsga wrote:
| > sailors didn't have access to the safe water of lakes and
| streams
|
| As if the water of lakes and streams was necessarily safe.
| Imagine drinking Thames water in the era before proper
| sewers. In 1858 (the Great Stink) the Thames stank so badly
| from feces that parts of Parliament became unusable.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| The alcohol wasnt what made beer safe. Beer was safer than
| water because to _make_ bear one must use sterile water. So
| beer at least started out sterile /boiled before it went into
| the barrel.
| larsga wrote:
| This is complete and utter nonsense. The water used in beer
| often had bacteria (and other stuff) but to brew beer you
| must mash, at 65C for an hour or more, which pasteurizes the
| beer. Hops protect the beer against bacteria, and the yeast
| also makes it hard for other organisms to multiply in the
| fermented beer. Alcohol is one of those ways, but only one.
| larsga wrote:
| > The percentage of alcohol required to preserve beer for long
| periods is too high for sailors to be drinking a gallon of it
| per day.
|
| Reading this thread I think the best thing would be if people
| were forbidden from comment on the history of beer in online
| forums. Nobody knows anything, yet everyone is shouting their
| misunderstandings from the rooftops.
|
| The Danish fleet, to take just one example, was completely
| dependent on a supply of "skibsol", to the extent that the king
| started his own brewery to ensure his fleet had a supply. Later
| kings started a stupid brewing monopoly system in Copenhagen to
| ensure no breweries went bankrupt, again with the same aim.
| "Skibsol" was a big thing in Norway and Sweden, too. The Royal
| Navy used to serve it, too, before switching to grog.
|
| Yes, weak beer will turn sour, but it takes a _lot_ to make it
| harmful.
| subpixel wrote:
| In the 17th and 18th centuries cider was far more prevalent on
| board - and massive amounts of it to boot.
|
| Source: Cider Country (James Crowden)
| larsga wrote:
| As a general statement about Europe or the UK that's completely
| impossible. There wasn't enough cider for it to be more common
| than beer. We also know beer was the most common (then later
| grog, at least for the navy).
|
| This might be true for some specific region or subset of ships,
| though.
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