[MR] wow.... just wow

[Alexandria Stratton]

I'm not sure I'd agree with that. 
Water is required to make beer and wine. If the water is bad, then so will be 
what you make of it. Boiling water was certainly a practice, as we've seen from 
various recipe sources. Fresh water was abundant in many places, and the Roman 
aqueducts were still in use for quite a while after the Empire fell. Folks did 
know how to dig wells, after all, and ground water was not nearly as commonly 
contaminated as it is today...(no nuclear waste dumps upriver)
Besides, one needs water to survive. The alcohol content would have had to equal 
that of distilled spirits to kill the alleged bacteria, which is a level 
unattainable for beer & wine. In short, if the water was bad, then the beer was 
bad, they'd both make you sick & die. Besides, alchohol dehydrates the body...

So my personal opinion is that the theory "they drank beer because the water was 
bad" is right up there with my opinion about the theory "they used spices 
because they ate rotted meat & needed to cover the taste". That being, if one 
could afford spices then one could afford fresh meat. If our ancestors ate 
rotten meat they would have gotten sick & died, and we wouldn't be here today 
because they wouldn't have lived to have children. 

Okay, I'll get off my soapbox now...
-- Isabelle LaFar
http://www.HouseBarra.com
Experience is what you get, when things go awry.





________________________________
From: David Chessler <chessler at usa.net>
Cc: atlantia at atlantia.sca.org
Sent: Sun, January 30, 2011 1:15:48 AM
Subject: Re: [MR] wow....  just wow

The only common one was alcohol in all its guises. Beer and wine were
preferred to water, which was generally unsafe, so most people were probably
half-bagged most of the time by modern standards. Hashish and Opium were known
and were used as medicines. Hashish was "abused" by the Assassin sect in
Arabia (or Persia), but was not apparently used in Europe.

Distilled spirits came in the late middle ages. Most of the accounts I have
read do not mention them. They were probably rare and expensive.