[MR] wow.... just wow

[Kelly Keck]

On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 2:55 PM, Alexandria Stratton <kyrilex at yahoo.com>wrote:

> 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...


Did anybody catch "How Beer Saved the World" on the Discovery Channel last
night?  It did mention the "water not being safe to drink" issue, and they
verified it with a lab test.  They tested water from a duck pond and
confirmed the presence of bacteria found in duck poop in that water.  They
made it into beer, in a process that involved boiling, and the bacteria were
not found in the beer.

Though, I'm sure a lot of water sources were perfectly safe.  You wouldn't
want to drink from a river in a city, but you make a good point about wells
being likely safer than they are today.  The problem is, without germ theory
or any way to test water, it's hard to tell which is safe and which isn't.

Adriana