When did people stop being drunk all the time?
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lefineder.substack.com
Drink and driving prevention and repression certainly played a big part in it.
But I think other factors came at play:
- Science. We know now better about the effect of alcohol. This drove the public opinion into a certain direction. Having the general acceptance this was a bad idea created policies to prevent things like having wine in schools in 1956: https://expat-in-france.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/wine-...
- Hygiene. If you can drink water safely from the tap, it helps.
- Moving to a service based society. If you don't have to work in a mine, you drink less.
- Other drugs came around. The ones you identify as such. And the one that are more innocent, like sugar, tv shows and social medias.
The coffee & alcohol cycle is also an interesting one in the West
High paced work environment & coffee jacking up your nervous system, and then in the evening using alcohol to calm it down (or other calmers like weed or painkillers).
Europe went from a depressant to a stimulant, suddenly lots of science.
I've heard that green tea can calm down the effects of caffeine (despite containing a bit of caffeine itself). Something to try if you don't want to give up coffee like me.
Otherwise, you are right. The main ban (children under the age of 14) was in 1956, or 67 years ago.
They tested it out and the test was successful. The kids preferred beer to sugary drinks. The beer was much weaker than what adults are accustomed to at 1.5% to 2% alcohol.
I don't get some countries or people that forbid alcohol until you are 18 or 21. I drank beer when I was 8 and got totally drunk at 14. Which was a good thing, because it was at home and, well, lesson learned. Starting with alcohol when going out at 18 or 21 sounds much more dangerous.
It certainly is not here in Austria. 17 year olds drinking beer between their late afternoon classes is not unheard of and often tolerated.
I finally understand this phrase! "I worship God and I'm His slave" just never seemed to ring any bells.
Let me tune your system for you: Slave to Love.
Sugar is not "literally poison". What it literally is is the body's primary energy source and a requirement for survival. The fact that eating too much of it is bad for you doesn't make it poisonous. Everything has a median lethal dose (LD50), including water.
You can perfectly healthily enjoy a moderate amount of sugar as part of a varied diet just like you can healthily eat a moderate amount of any food as part of a varied diet. Extreme diet fads and the demonisation of entire food groups work against moderation and variety which are what we actually need in our eating habits.
None of this is to say there isn't a huge sugar problem in modern society, ofc. What I'm saying is the problem is excess, not the consumption of it at all, and demonising it as "poison" and attempting to eliminate it entirely is not the way to bring about moderation.
it would be extremely difficult to run a marathon without sugar in some form
Which chronic diseases are caused by sugar and nothing else?
To my experience, society changed enough to no longer tolerate--or at least accept as normal- drunken family members. There was a point where the always-drunken-grandfather was suddenly considered ill and no longer just a little weird. A noticed this in my own family when I was still young. There was a point where constant-drunkenness was suddenly frowned upon with a certain vigor. And the younger generation sort of got the message: "I dont want to be like grandpa, he is actually a poor devil..."
It's worth remembering that alcohol sterilizes many otherwise dangerous things. Being drunk all the time can easily be better than being sick all the time.
The sterilizing only really happens in modern wine level alcohol (14%).
So no you can't satisfy your long term hydration needs by drinking anything strong enough to be safe by its alcohol content alone.
https://elpais.com/gastronomia/el-comidista/2015/11/11/artic...
In Spanish, but if you are a French speaker you might get some hints.
Ad from 1961:
https://verne.elpais.com/verne/2014/10/13/articulo/141317743...
What people here would find unbelievable is how much we drank as teenagers. I remember drinking mixes (double shot of hard liquors, like gin, with soda) as soon as 14 and they would serve us openly in bars. Different times.
Uh...if you have to work with the public, or incompetent people, you may be driven to drink more. The people who work in infosec seem to be the drunkest I know. They do mostly leave it for after work though, because it has gotten quite easy to do sobriety tests on people that are more than subjective.
Less so in tech-heavy Utah, I imagine.
Fresh water outsiderof cities was abundant, and inside cities there was usually a system of wells, often running water wells at that.
If you don't have to work in an 1800s-England-style coal mine, sure. Modern mining is a high risk occupation with stringent controls on intoxicants.
University students are adults though, so that's not that surprising? (Well, Americans are a bit of an outlier with their 21 drinking age)
Here in north if we drink during lunch, we keep going.
Unless you are a software dev...
I'm one of those persons that think this is a luxury job.
Not buying it. Common sense has always been enough to see the downsides of alcohol. If people dont care about losing motor functioning and having a painful hangover right now they wont care about a chance they will have liver problems in 40 years.
- Society is now expected to be your babysitter. If your actions have negative consequences, they should have been forbidden and prevented.
If a lot of people smoke, then a lot of them develop respiratory (and other) problems. So a lot more people need treatment, which could have gone to other patients. At that point it is no longer an individial situation which affects only you, it's a societal problem. Societies which don't address their problems eventually fade out.
It's not babysitting, it's self-defense.
But I often think about the framers of the Constitution drinking vast quantities that fateful, blistering summer of 1787: http://johnjayhomestead.org/wp-content/uploads/In-the-Cups-o...
They were, and remain, literally some of the most functional human beings in history.
Fascinates me to see these two extremes in behavior.
Americans should probably date "stopping being drunk all the time" to Prohibition; the overwhelming national support for it, especially from newly enfranchised women(+), gives an idea as to how big a problem it was.
(+) As a non-American, I had to check this, and Prohibition very slightly pre-dates universal votes for women although both were in 1920 and it may be possible that the franchise differed by state? It's certainly true that women temperance campaigners were very important, given the role of alcohol in domestic violence and budgeting.
edit: I should also note tolerance to alcohol is a warning that much greater problems are imminent. It is a red flag.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0013zl8
ps. there's also some fascinating speculation at the end about connections between the temperance movement and early movements for women's rights and how that played out very differently on each side of the Atlantic.
> Wine is taken to be 0.12 alcohol, the same number is used in modern estimates of alcohol consumption. The amount of alcohol consumed by drinking historical beer brews is between 0.62 to 0.107, the % of alcohol in “small beer” is taken to be around 0.05 and the % in “strong beer” is taken to be around 0.135,
"For sailors the beer supplied was of the strong kind (10%-15% alcohol) since this was the only kind that preserved itself well in the sea, hence drunk as a sailor."
Would 4.5L of 2% ABV make you drunk? Depends how quickly you can drink it. It's 9 units of alcohol. We commonly assume the body can process 1 unit/hour so if this quantity was consumed over an entire day, I don't think you'd get merry.
I'm not saying it's a good idea to drink like this, just highlighting the impact of ABV on the outcome.
Which had me thinking of various pecuniary benefits armies pass and why. Salt -> salary is well documented, on the opposite side slightly less so but still somewhat known was for conquering armies to compensate farmers for essentially pillage as the monetary compensation can't buy much grain nor meat when the army's eaten the village's as well as that of surrounding villages. It also wasn't unusual for state coffers to run dry also, delaying soldiers' salaries, plus graft - several banks still around were founded on the basis of lending to a liquidity starved crown, a modern placation and guarantee of support in the classical baronesque sense perhaps.
And I became curious about all the other money-like tokens, like these beer rations, backed by the promise of a commodity, that floated around in those time, and in ours today. Meandering thoughts, the best kind.
How did they brew such small beers? Nowadays the non-alcoholic beers (basically 0.5%) are mostly made by removing alcohol after brewing, which greatly affects the taste. I think it's a highly desirable skill to be able to brew good small beers. (Or maybe those beers were just not very good by today's standards.)
- Toast 300g sliced [rye] bread to near burning
- Boil 3 liters of water, turn off, insert/soak bread
- Let sit covered for 6 hours
- Add 150g sugar, 6g instant yeast
- Let sit covered for 18 hours
- Remove bread, strain out extra liquid from it. Birds love it, once it dries out.
- Bottle up the liquid (leave headspace for gassing), and occasionally burp it.
- Wait. Longer bottling period = smoother, less carbonated, more alcohol, less sweet. ~12 hours, but this is very subjective.
- Chill + drink. Take the lid off very carefully, aim away from eyes.
In Finland, a home-made small beer (kotikalja) remains a popular drink in the countryside. The alcohol content is around 1%. It’s a sweet brown mush that you can make in one day at home using rye malt sold in every grocery store. Here’s a video:
It's not up to modern standards for "alcohol free" beecs, but it works if you're just aiming to hydrate while avoiding pathogens in your water supply.
"Take his entry for the night of 16 October 1783. Boswell records that he and six friends consumed 11 bottles of claret, two of other wines, two of Madeira, three of port, and one of rum. The next night, they polished off 11 bottles of claret, three of other wines, three of port and three of rum."
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2004/dec/19/unitedkingdom...
[1] usually mixed with coffee several times during the day, and very often a shot glass in the evening
[2] I've never seen a sober postman when I visited my grand parents as a kid in the 80's and 90's. Back in the days they weren't timed and would be invited for a coffee at every single farm they visited to talk about the news of the day. He really served as a local and vocal newspaper for all of them. The coffee itself wasn't strong in cafeine, but was almost always served with "la goutte", a small but significant amount of spirit.
I still miss the quality homemade one when far away from the Balkans.
[1] https://www.jergovic.com/ajfelov-most/pater-franz-pfaner-o-v...
The gnole as you speak is more something that became popular amongst the Poilu during the first world war and after, I'm not sure if there was loads of people drinking it in the past but it feels like the spirits became more popular by the end of the 20th centuary.
I would say in the case of cider you have to drink an awful lot to feel intoxicated, you definitely suffer from diarrea before you feel the alcohol.
there was a book or paper out like 25 years ago that speculated that as the Age of Enlightenment coincided with the start of European tea and coffee drinking, the general uptick in the usage of stimulants instead of alcohol must have contributed to the intellectual flowering through to the Renaissance, at least for the literate classes.
So that's when one group of people stopped being drunk all the time.
That's the difference between a sufficient condition and a necessary condition. It's likely a combination of factors were required that might not have been available in other places. But there were something akin to renaissances in other places before Europe, but changing environments/factors limited their impact or spread, or even outright ended them.
I always find the argument "but why didn't this happen elsewhere" bizarre, when ... it usually has happened elsewhere. Ignorance isn't a great argument. Like, other places often had sewers and other sanitation long before Europe, which implies that alcohol could have been a limiting factor for Europe while not being a limiting factor elsewhere.
Also, industrialization saw the rise of the skilled workforce. People started earning more the more they could use their brain. It makes sense that they wouldn't want to numb it as much as they did before.
There was a switchboard with buttons for emergency breaks (e.g.toilet break). If you used it the machine stopped, a yellow light flashed and the foreman shouted at you.
I don't write this to complain, actually for me doing this for a couple of weeks during summer recess was quite fun. After this experience I also totally see how you just cannot do a job like that for 40+ years without alcohol.
At that factory drinking previously had been common among workers. They banned alcohol during weekdays after one worker fell into a spinning milling machine. But even after that those workers who came in on Saturdays were allowed to consume a limited quantity of beer.
Not neccessarily. The whole Luddite revolution/movement was trying to fight industrialization _because_ it required less skills, and reduced workers' wages. For example, before the automatic looms were introduced, cloth was produced by hand, by people of significant dexterity and skill. After automation, it was mainly produced by machines which needed only very basic (and low paid) human input here and there.
I'm not so sure. Before industrialization, most jobs were skilled. For one, most people were farmers, and it required a lifetime of knowledge (usually passed on from previous generations). Whereas today, lots (most?) of people are employed in jobs which don't require much training. In factory work jobs, it's enough that you are literate and can do basic arithmetic. In many office jobs and service jobs, it's that plus possibly some basic computer skills. The actual training often takes one day and teaches you everything you need to know to perform the job well.
Pretty soon the demand (and pay) for skilled craftsmen rocketed back up because the newly affluent workers could now afford to buy more items and some of those were not yet mass-producable.
That’s the exact opposite of reality. They worked 12-16 hour shifts for unlivable wages, crammed several families per room, and lived without any of the infrastructure that makes high densities livable like modern sewer systems. It was the age of cholera and truly awful living conditions.
People didn’t move into the cities because it was better for them but because industrialization forced them to. Peasants didn’t start asking for worker’s rights until the industrial revolution because it was so much worse than working conditions in subsistence farming.
In some physical jobs like the construction business, workers used to rely on alcohol to make through the work day until very recently. In some countries they might even still do so.
I can confirm from my own experience building a house and doing heavy lifting on the construction site, that after 10 hours of taxing work, an evening beer works wonders to relax your strained muscles and regain some feeling of comfort.
It's no surprise to me, that the reduction in alcohol consumption coincides with a switch from more hard physical labor, to more sitting jobs.
I think it's a bit like how I crave ice cold Coke when I'm thirsty on a hot summer day but then when I just drink tap water that craving reduces significantly. Therefore I know that my body really needed water but my brain translated in into a craving for Coke. There might be some similar learned behaviours between hard labourers and beer.
The catch is that without germ theory, people mostly did this process to water which was obviously contaminated. If water looked clean and tasted clean, why purify it? Even people who should know germ theory still make this mistake—people who go backpacking will take water from a clear stream and drink it, unaware that there is a beaver dam upstream and giardia in the water.
In many ways it filled (and still does, as does coffee) many of the same roles as alcohol. Certainly not the partying aspect, but as a beverage to have with food, relax or socialise with. Alcohol was consumed a lot more often in those more mundane contexts before.
What everybody who does not feel well under these conditions should never the less consider is: Connections are formed during these events and collective rule breaking is an effective bonding mechanism. Further more, getting intoxicated together is a convenient way to make statements and have a degree of deniability afterwards.
Now my Fridays are filled with the same monotony as the rest of the work week.
You need to make social engagements during the day with friends. Otherwise it's lonely and isolating. as a nice plus, seeing your actual friends is much nicer than seeing your workplace "friends" who'd likely sell you out for half a dollar.
Go grab lunch at a pub, coffee, do some exercise or whatever.
I soon stopped drinking at lunch though, never do it anymore, never got much work done in the afternoon and made me a bit too aggressive..
So I find it reasonable to believe that people used to be for most centuries consuming alcohol but moderately affected. As in, they would not have appeared heavily intoxicated. Of course it would have affected their health and increased risk to become an alcohol addict, but then, it seems alcohol was actually not so cheap until cheap liquor from grains and potatoes became available.
Beer used to be a seasonal drink due to lack of cooling, or without engineered yeasts it’s alcohol content low.
The article is no longer available, but here’s a summary https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3209119/Why-... and here’s a follow-up of sorts https://draftmag.com/how-many-beers-to-get-drunk/
We both noted how we used to drink a lot more, meaning we're just as cool and fashionable as The Kids These Days, who are according to several news reports drinking less than college kids were a decade or so ago.
A few days later, he said he figured it out: for each of the ~3-4% ABV beers I drink, he's drinking a ~7-8% IPA. Him "catching up" (round for round/pint for pint) was consuming twice the alcohol as I was. I said I'd noticed that myself, when moving to a major city where most beers were $8 IPAs - having a couple beers at lunch would make me tired, if not drunk, and I'd need a cup of coffee on the way back to get going again.
I'm too lazy to do The Math, but I can't help but wonder how the "Kids These Days Drink Less Alcohol" charts line up with the "Kids These Days Seem To Prefer IPAs" chart. (It seems ABV has little to do with the historical trend presented here, though)
> Wine is taken to be 0.12 alcohol, the same number is used in modern estimates of alcohol consumption. The amount of alcohol consumed by drinking historical beer brews is between 0.62 to 0.107, the % of alcohol in “small beer” is taken to be around 0.05 and the % in “strong beer” is taken to be around 0.135, the relative consumption of small and strong beer is depended on whether we use the numbers from “Vandelint 1734” or the estimates in the studies mentioned in table 2.1 in “Alcohol, Sex, and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe”
That said, they're also much more casual about consuming cannabis since it's been legal their whole adult lives, which often leads to them drinking less when they go out.
The constantly changing units of consumption, historical timing, changes between daily and annual rates of consumption and similar made it difficult to understand exactly the point that was being made.
The author dug up a lot of data and put it together, but didn't going the extra step of unifying things in a way that's easy to understand.
I kept having to convert the units they were using to units I could understand, and since those units weren't constant, it's difficult to get an overall impression.
But, a few examples I did convert to amounts of drinking I understand:
* In Florence in 1455, someone (IDK if this is an average, an individual, a certain class of people or what?) drank 250L of wine in a year. That's about .9 modern size bottles of wine per day. A good amount, but I expect if you were practiced at it and drank it fairly evenly throughout the day, you certainly wouldn't appear drunk.
* In the medieval city of Ghent, the apparent average per person annual consumption was ~40-liters wine and ~1300-liters beer. That works out to basically 7.5 pints (16oz, or the size of one of the tall cans of that craft beer often comes in in the US) of beer every day, and a quite small glass of wine. Depending on how strong the beer was (doesn't specify if this was small ~5% or strong ~12% beer), I expect even a practiced drinker would be quite tipsy after close to 8 pints and a touch of wine every day.
* Sailors got a ration of 8 pints of strong (13% ABV) beer a day, which would have me absolutely knocked off my feet. 3 pints of what I think of as strong beer (~6-8%) in any kind of close succession and I'm definitely feeling tipsy, and shouldn't be let anywhere near something so complex as rigging. Though, after reading a few books on naval life aboard 16th century British sailing ships, perhaps being totally out of it for as much of the journey as possible would be a solid survival tactic.
* The "historical average" (IDK what period of history, or how average) beer consumption was around 380 liters per person per year. That's just over 2.2 pints per person per day. A long way from "being drunk all the time", even if it was higher ABV strong beer (and it certainly wasn't all high ABV).
Certainly, people seemed to have drunk much more in the past than they do today, but it's hard to make clear conclusions when the units are all over the place.
16+ hour days of hard, hot, hypervigilant, dangerous work with a chunk nearly always unpaid; no health insurance; socially isolated from everyone you don't work with, and they also probably have unhealthy lifestyles... I imagine our reasons weren't much different than others throughout history. Hard to make healthy life choices in that life.
But still - by the article's definition, 8 strong pints would be the equivalent of 16 16oz IPAs in a day. I'm sure there are heavy drinkers that could do it and hide it pretty well, but I think your average person would be pretty flat.
I expect I'd be asleep in the corner if not passed out.
That’s mostly a myth.
> as the river was the source of clean water
Also mostly a myth. e.g. they weren’t drinking water from the Thames in medieval London for instance but from the Tyburn river. The case in most cities was that you had stream and springs which were legally protected and you poured your waste downstream into some major river. Obviously shit happened and water sources got polluted from time to time with terrible consequences but they still drank water all the time.
So obviously, sailors during the age of sail couldn't have 13% ABV beer. They had rum though, so maybe the drinks they had were mixed with rum to reach 13%.
If sailors were issue "strong beer", I would guess it is like today's regular beer, maybe in the order of 5-6%. As opposed to "small beer", that was maybe 1-2%. Sometimes it was less than 1%, not even enough to qualify as an alcoholic drink in many countries today.
As for wine, it also tended to be weaker than modern wine, most likely under 10%, and it was often watered down.
The reason beer and wine are so consistently strong today is that we have good knowledge of the fermentation process and we are able to precisely control all the variables. They didn't even know what kind of yeast that had back in the days, they mostly used what was floating in the air where they were. Now we have lab grown yeasts, selectively bred for maximum performance.
iirc "beer" as it was back then was more like 0.5% ABV
A better contemporary comparison might be be something like kombucha.
The problem? The fucking Pantheon in Rome. It existed, and at that time built over a thousand years prior. It demonstrated that it was possible to build domes and that the technology had been lost to humanity. Artists and architects worth their salt all spent time in Rome learning architecture and design from the ancient ruins, by then nearly a thousand years old.
Brunelleschi, and his best friend Donatello, were no different, having visit Rome sometime in the early 1400s to study. Rome at the time was a decrepit, dangerous, insecure, place to go. However, based on what he learned, Brunalleschi developed concepts of architecture, light, balance, and other ideas, which garnered him commissions back in Florence. Based on his work and excellent delivery, the Medici (THE Medici family) hired him to build various things including the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence. Which, if you've been there, feels like a frustrated first draft of the Duomo. The Basilica of Santo Spirito is the second draft.
Along the way he started working with vaults, then domes (very important!)
There was a competition, Brunalleschi's friend, Donatello, provided an absolutely incredible scaled demo of Brunalleschi's concept, and he won the competition against rival Ghiberti.
Once he won the commission, he set to work figuring out how to actually do it at scale. The "dome within a dome" architectural idea he inherited from prior work (technological debt!), but set out to create several new management and construction innovations which included:
- a maturing of the "dome within a dome" concept
- new hoisting machines
- new designs which eliminated legacy concepts such as flying buttresses and strengthened traditional bricklaying concepts
- entirely new management concepts:
1. Workers stay up in the construction site, going up and down hundreds of stairs was a waste of time (e.g. context shifting).
2. Resources, such as food and wine were to be brought to the workers in-place to save time and improve productivity.
3. The wine was to be diluted with water, similar to the quality of wine brought to pregnant women, this prevented drunkenness, as well as water-borne illnesses, which made the workers more productive.
The dome, the lantern on top, and the four surround mini-dome took from 1420-1445 (with the dome completed in 1436). Remember, this was to build something had been lost, science fiction, technology of the ancients, merely a hundred years prior.
Lessons for today:
1. Study what's come before
2. Honor your predecessors, but invent anyway
3. Focus on worker productivity, don't waste their time with context switching and perks that provide "nutrition-free" benefits.
Other observations:
1. Humans had identified alcohol as both a way to make water safer to drink, and a problem for pregnant women. Fetal alcohol syndrome had been observed and a reduced intake of alcohol had been identified as a way to reduce the problem.
2. It was possible to negotiate worker relations in such a way that they didn't hate, offered them benefits, and improved productivity.
3. Everybody competes, killer demos and prior work win future work.
How? There isn’t enough alcohol in wine to kill much bacteria, especially if you mix it with water.
According to the table 3.10 [0], leisure time was greater on Monday than on Sunday.
Do I understand it correctly? Monday was the previous Sunday in Christian societies?
[0] https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/9...
Not sure exactly, but I think Sunday was always Sunday. It's Saturday that changed.
> The amount of alcohol consumed by drinking historical beer brews is between 0.62 to 0.107, the % of alcohol
I think you meant “0.062” not “0.62” am I wrong ?
Cheers for the informative article :)
When did people have ever been drunk all the time?
People drank more because there was a lot less alcohol in the alcoholic beverages on average, but it was some people drinking a lot more (really, an awful lot more), not the average person drinking more than today.
A person drinking a bottle of whisky a day would count as 22 drinks, the average today is around 1 drink per person per day, so that one person alone would count as 22 people.
You don't see many people drinking that amount of alcohol today, but it wasn't uncommon in certain jobs in the recent past.
Beers were similar to fermented milk they drink in Mongolia[1], wine had a similar alcohol content of today only for upper classes products, the average had higher alcohol content to preserve it better or it would spoil and taste like vinegar, but it was mostly drank mixed with herbs, honey and diluted with water (vinification was much different back then, the final product often reminded a syrup more than a liquid).
For a lot of time in many places alcoholic beverages were also banned by religions on public health grounds.
But the most important reason is that the "industry" of beverages (soda, juice, energy drinks, etc), advertising and marketing had not been invented yet.
And probably the amount of stimulants and sugar we get from these "non-alcoholic " beverages are more damaging to our health than alcohol alone.
For optimal health, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommend consuming no more than 6 tsp of added sugar daily. By drinking just one serving of cola a day, a person will easily exceed this amount. A 2015 study attributed 184,000 global deaths each year to the consumption of sugary drinks.
this is sugary drinks alone, notice that when you look at the stats for alcohol related deaths, they also include incidents or accidents where someone had some alcohol (> 0) in their system, the same stats are not kept for sugar/caffeine/stimulants in general.
There is plenty of reason to believe these beers were not <1% alcohol as is often described. A 16th century English soldier receiving 7-8 pints a day of 2-5.5% beer is between 2.25 fl oz and 7 fl oz of pure alcohol - so between 4 - 11.5 “standard drinks” a day, assuming that was their only consumption.
Although I am not a heavy drinker (mostly only drink alcohol on weekends), I am fine with 3-4 6.5% beers in a day, or similar consumption of alcohol in wine, especially if not binge drinked but over the course of a day mixed with meals. Even the nights I get totally drunk I very rarely feel sick the next day. The reason: even when I drink alcohol I also drink a lot of water. Usually the next day's sickness is due to dehydratation of the brain. If you keep hydrated (with water!) on top of your alcohol consumption even if you are drunk you won't suffer from it the next day.
Having said that, not feeling sick the next day doesn't mean you don't do any damages to your body and your brain.
20% of the people consume 80% of the alcohol.
Last week I drank 3 liters of beers and was pretty fine. It's when I went for the next liter and vodka when I... were fine, honestly. Not great, sure, and any sport activity was out of question. The biggest problem was what I came home at 5 AM which of course messed up my schedule again.
Different beers affect me differently, sometimes I would feel bad next day from just 2 beers. While it does depend a lot if I was active (dancing) and how much water I took on alongside the beer, the brand itself makes a huge difference. If you experiment a bit you might find that some beers are actually bad. Not sure where this comes from, trace amounts of methanol? Some other contaminants? Not sure but it does make a difference.
Right now my fav beer is Hoegaarden for example :-D
3 unfiltered IPAs? I’m not getting up from bed the next day.
I want to see a beer consumption graph by state/county of Austria. Wanted to chime in as my experience is so different from yours.
And since it's mind and behaviour-altering, I often wonder if human minds had to evolve to compensate for constant drunkenness. Are we all more obsessive and intelligent to make up for constant drunkenness making us sloppy and dumb?
Evolution is slow (unless it's a huge bottleneck event).
As for humans, current scientific consensus is that 5000 years ago virtually no human adult could digest milk, and now lactose tolerance is prevalent in like 95% of European-descended people.
And none of the above would appear in a visual inspection of a skeleton.
I figure the kind of neurological and digestive adaptations to being perma-buzzed might be similar.
There is a word for 0.62 alcohol beer: whiskey.
https://twitter.com/historyinmemes/status/166851023189728870...
"You can't drink when you want to, you have to wear a seatbelt. Pretty soon we'll be a Communist country".
Does that echo, or what?
Walking into any of those craft brew places where I live I'll be lucky to find 5% almost everything is some crazy 6.5% and up now.
Though I will say that the current trend with Double IPAs and Hazy IPAs where they all now start at 7% and go up to 10% is definitely outside of the historical norm.
But it gets weirder the more you look at it, and especially once you get into the 1700s. There is a proliferation of spirits drinking in the Anglosphere starting then, split between Gin and Whiskey. Gin became a big thing in London, probably at something like 30% alcohol, but was sold in beer volumes. People were drinking pints of straight gin, to the point where it became a big public health crisis. And of course you get the importation and rise in popularity of whiskey distilling from Scotland to the American colonies as a means to use up excess wheat and corn in a shelf stable way. From the 1700s until prohibition I get the impression that public drunkenness was FAR more common in the US and (to a lesser degree) the UK than it is now.
Although it doesn't specify weight or volume, but the 5% alcohol beer seems to be equivalent of the "small beer".
There are also the "pure alcohol" charts in the table that I think try and account for it.
Also there's the comment about beer for sailors in the 10-15% range.
So taken together it seems modern people are indeed an awful lot less drunk than they were in the middle ages.
If you’re referring to the “0.05” figure i think that is just out of a unit of 1. IOW multiply by 100 to get %. They use % in other parts of the post.
Among other things:
> The beer in these accounts was graded with the nomenclature typical of the period. Historians generally identify three main strengths of beer in accounts and brewing instructions: ‘strong beer’, perhaps with a particular seasonal association like ‘October’ or ‘March’; ‘ordinary’ or ‘household’ beer; and ‘small’ beer. Within these categories, there was variation in quality and strength, and a tendency for types to overlap. Names also varied over time. While such issues make estimating the relative amounts of each type produced difficult, there are indications that ordinary beer was the most consumed overall, particularly by the working classes. This is confirmed by the Irish accounts. At Dublin Castle, household production focused on two kinds, strong and ordinary, of which far more was drunk of the latter. In the yearly account for 1574, only 13 per cent of beer consumed was strong. Other years showed similar values.
And some strong wines can be sweet, because the grapes had so much sugar that the yeast couldn't ferment it all.
Sorry. Couldn’t resist. I’ll show myself out.
All of human history? Seems excessively generous tbh.
> Fascinates me to see these two extremes in behavior.
I too would need a half bottle of port to write about freedom and liberty while my slaves built me a countryside mansion.
You almost certainly would not have, had you been born in the same period of time.
Let's not pretend that people in the past were monsters simply because they lived during the period of time they lived. Maybe they were all racist monsters by today's standards, but had they been born today they'd be completely different. We are not inherently better than them because we happen to have the dominant opinions of our time and they had the dominant opinions of theirs.
People KNEW slavery was wrong, but those in power did not want to admit it. The same way that we KNOW it's wrong to horde massive wealth while children go hungry and people do not have access to basic medical care.
Indeed, after deposing the monarchy of your mother country, and setting about to create a republic in the face of thousands of years of bloody noble rivalries over succession to the throne, a tall pint of cider is well in order.
Don’t interrupt that sober-minded Patriotism, now.
Just regular good old ancestor / politician worship.
Also they were mad at the British for not allowing them to steal Native American land in a disorganized way. You had to go the Crown which would negotiate with the tribe on your behalf etc. Washington (especially) of course had other ideas..
When trying to learn more about it I found a Snopes article at https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-price-they-paid/ discussing a letter going around titled "The Price They Paid" making the claim "Five [of the 56] signers were captured by the British as traitors and tortured before they died."
Snopes comments that while five of the signers were indeed captured, four appear to have been treated as normal prisoners of war after being captured in battle ("they were not tortured, nor is there evidence that they were treated more harshly than other wartime prisoners who were not also signatories to the Declaration") and the fifth - singled out for signing - was sent to prison.
Wikipedia comments that the fifth, Richard Stockton, was "intentionally starved and subjected to freezing cold weather. After nearly five weeks of brutal treatment, Stockton was released on parole with his health ruined." quoting a 1823 biography.
But was that torture? Reading the biography, at https://archive.org/details/biographyofsign03sand/page/100/m... , the issue appears to be that rich Mr. Stockton, used to living the high life, has been placed in the commoner jail rather than the comfy jail for rich people:
> On his removal to New York, he was ignominiously consigned to the common prison, and without the least regard for his rank, age, and delicate health, for some time treated with unusual severity.
As Congress described it, "that he hath been ignominiously thrown into a common gaol, and there detained".
And the common jail had horrible conditions. Quoting https://www.americanwars.org/american-prisoners-revolution/p... :
> "The New Jail was made a Provost Prison, and here officers and men of note were confined. At one time they were so crowded into this building, that when they lay down upon the floor to sleep all in the row were obliged to turn over at the same time at the call, 'Turn over! Left! Right!'
> "The sufferings of these brave men were largely due to the criminal indifference of Loring, Sproat, Lennox, and other Commissaries of the prisoners.
> "Many of the captives were hanged in the gloom of night without trial and without a semblance of justice.
It doesn't seem like any of the founders were tortured during the war.
https://benjaminfranklinhouse.org/education/benjamin-frankli...
I would not like going to such an era. Also, beer is kinda pasteurized, safe water to drink.
Think about it this way. We are living in an era that will eventually be thought of as a time where people couldn't imagine how we lived.
I learned to sleep on my stomach a while ago
Solid decision. I'm 50 now, I certainly feel better overall now than then. If I'm tired in the morning it's only because I went to bed too late and/or lifted (too?) heavy the day before.
Also I always enjoyed my jobs. I was perfectly happy to talk about work during lunch hour. And booze didn’t improve the discourse any.
Once people began leaving the peasant life for the factory life (many of them because they were forced to) things changed for the worse in that respect.
In 1917 the taxes on booze went sky high and the drinking crashed, but it wasn't unusual to be drunk at work.
https://videnskab.dk/kultur-samfund/braendevins-historie-sna...