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They were most certainly tossed off their butts in the antebellum US at least: "Drink was everywhere in early America. “Liquor at that time,” recalled the Massachusetts carpenter Elbridge Boyden, “was used as commonly as the food we ate.” Americans drank in enormous quantities. Their yearly consumption at the time of the Revolution has been estimated at the equivalent of three-and-a-half gallons of pure, two-hundred proof alcohol for each person. After 1790 American men began to drink even more. By the late 1820s imbibing had risen to an all-time high of almost four gallons per capita."[0]
That 1820s number, if you do the math, was ~1.4 shots of Everclear or 3.5 shots of modern 80 proof whiskey per day for the average citizen. Wikipedia [1] has some more info on the boozing of people in those antebellum days. Suffice to say, it was a lot of booze. You can debate the strengths of these particular spirits and beers and people's drinking habits, but form what written evidence we have, the US was a nation populated by either a lot of very tipsy people, or a lot of sober people and some very drunk people.
[0] http://www.teachushistory.org/second-great-awakening-age-ref... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisine_of_Antebellum_America#...
> “Liquor at that time,” recalled the Massachusetts carpenter Elbridge Boyden, “was used as commonly as the food we ate.”
And it made perfect sense in the age before refrigeration. Since alcohol doesn't spoil it's a great way to achieve long-term storage of calories from grains (beer, whiskey) or fruit (wine, brandy). For many centuries the French peasant would be sustained in his daily labors by the bottle of wine in his pocket.
In rural areas alcohol was a necessity, not a luxury. Part of the reason why the young Federal government ran into trouble imposing what it thought was a tax on vice [1].
Those quantities don't sound enormous - nowhere near enough that being "tossed off their butts" or "very tipsy" could have been the typical experience. Four gallons of pure ethanol per year works out to 4*128/365 = 1.4 ounces per day. That would have most likely been consumed in the form of beer or cider, and even if we assume a relatively modest 5% ABV, that's only 28 fluid ounces of alcoholic beverage per day - less than two pints. That's nowhere near enough to get plastered as a regular occurrence - that's just a culture where it's normal that the beverage you consume with your meals happens to be moderately alcoholic.
Could it be explained with the same imbalance as we currently have, assuming this is accurate? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think...
tl;dr: the top three 10% brackets consume ~1 "drink" per day, then ~2/day, and the top consumes ~10/day. That top bracket they summarize as consuming "a little more than four-and-a-half 750 ml bottles of Jack Daniels" each week.
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edit: Which is (750x4.5x0.4)/7=193ml of pure alcohol per day, or ((750x4.5)/7)/(44ml per shot)=11 shots per day. So it doesn't quite, but if you raise the ground floor of half the population to one or two per day instead of zero, it might balance out.
750: ml/jack daniels bottle. 4.5: bottles/week. 0.4: 80 proof = 0.4 alcohol content. 44ml = 1.5floz
> ~1.4 shots of Everclear or 3.5 shots of modern 80 proof whiskey per day
Or a couple of pints. So that's lunch - did they not drink in the evenings in those days?
I have to wonder how it impacted human evolution. I mean, evolutionary psychology (for what little good the field is) usually dwells on "savannah ancestors" and whatnot, but centuries of being perpetually drunk is going to have an impact too.
Not just in terms of tolerance, but in terms of mental conditions. If the ground-state of the human mind is tipsy, then is sobriety functionally an abnormal state we're maladapted for?
4 shots of whiskey is quite a lot but for many people wouldn't lead to anything resembling drunk if consumed over a period of several hours.
> That 1820s number, if you do the math, was ~1.4 shots of Everclear or 3.5 shots of modern 80 proof whiskey per day for the average citizen.
3.5 shots of whiskey is about the same amount of alcohol as 3.5 beers. Round up, and it's a couple at lunch and a couple at dinner. Almost nobody's going to get very drunk off that, and a lot (most?) people won't even get tipsy. Factor in that people build up a tolerance to alcohol, and it doesn't seem too bad.
Long term, I'm curious if it's any worse than 4 sodas a day?
It would be interesting to see the epigentic effects of generations of alcohol use. Kind of like Terence McKenna's "stoped ape" theory.
I did do the math. At 1.5 oz, there are 85 shots in a gallon.
85 * 4 gallons = 340 shots.
340 /.40 (80 proof alcohol) = 850
850/365 = ~2.3 shots of 40% alcohol.
But then 1.5 oz shot is pretty small and my knob Creek is 50% :)
Edit: so it's 3.5 oz, not shots. Also, mmmmm whiskey.
3.5 gal would be ~13l.
Sure, more than today, but not remarkably so:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_c...
the article talks about the early modern period - that period would end with the 19th century; They certainly weren't too sober in London town - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gin_Craze
But at this point in time Britain had a rather high standard of living (compared with the rest of the world), so go figure.
https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/Allen/unpublished/econin...
I was a bit taken aback by this statement: "[Dr.] James [Sumner], a historian of science and technology... argues that ‘alcohol by volume’ was rarely used as a measure of strength for beers and wines until the work of nineteenth-century French chemists such as Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, and that it’s therefore ahistorical to apply it to earlier cultures and beverages." To me, this is like saying that because trilobites did not make measurements of ocean pH, it would be wrong for us to estimate the acidity of Cambrian oceans. Is there more to this than just an absurdly dogmatic backlash against Whig historiography?
Compared to the paragraph before it, I think he's just saying our estimates of ABV may be wildly off because we don't have a great historical basis for them. Our modern notion of what constitutes wine or liquor is based in part on ABV ranges. If we say "ancient peoples drank wine nonstop", someone might think you're talking about a ~15% ABV beverage, when that isn't necessarily true.
That's a good question. Reading it charitably, one could interpret that to mean either 1) we can't reliably estimate alcohol by volume prior to the 19th century because there weren't reliable tools to measure it or 2) pre-19th century people didn't think in terms of ABV, and that this may have meant that they experienced drunkenness differently on a subjective level. I'm generally anti-Whig but I'm with you on this one in hoping that there's more to it than that.
I think it has to do with understanding the goals of beer manufacturing in an earlier era: they weren't targeting ABV ratios, and maybe understood the "strength" of beer in a much less precise way than we do. Thus if you read that so-and-so person had 3 quarts of "strong beer" a day with their cheese and pork trimmings it might be jumping to conclusions to assume it was all in the 5-7% range.
My reading of it was that "Small Beer" and "Table Beer" may have not had characteristic ABVs as they didn't use ABV to classify types of drink then.
I made cyder at home a couple of years ago (about 8 gallons).
I had 2 pints at one sitting, I have no memory of the evening past about 10pm and when I woke up my first thought was that I had had a stroke.
The rest of the stuff is still sitting in the shed.
I'll tell you a story that happened to me
One day as I went down to Cork by the sea
The sun it was hot and the day it was warm,
Says I a quiet pint wouldn't do me no harm
I went in and I called for a bottle of stout
Says the barman, I'm sorry, all the beer is sold out
Try whiskey or paddy, ten years in the wood
Says I, I'll try cider, I've heard it was good.
Oh never, Oh never, Oh never again
If I live to be a hundred or a hundred and ten
I fell to the ground and I couldn't get up
After drinking a quart of the Johnny Jump Up
You might need to distill off the methanol that might be present, if you're blacking out. Had a similar problem with some homebrew wine where a glass tossed me to blacking out (yet I can toss back a half pint of vodka without too much issue.) Turned out there was a good amount of methanol in there.
I make cider every year and I've never had any problems - I think it's the easiest form of alcohol to make.
On the question of methanol, it is my understanding it comes from the high pectin content. I always use a pectic enzyme to break down the pectin, mainly because that releases more sugars and makes the cider clearer, but possibly it helps stop methanol formation? I know it can be an issue if you distill cider into apple brandy (calvados) - but that's illegal in the UK anyway without a license, so has never been an issue.
Friend of mine's family made something which they called 'apple wine': an open bucket with sugar, apple juice, some citrus (lemon juice, I believe) and then left for about a week. (With muslin over the top to keep the flies off!)
Wild yeast causes it to start fermenting. Once it begins to froth, you bottle. After another week or so it's lightly carbonated and very slightly alcoholic.
The thing is, it continues to ferment in the bottles. So as time passes, it gets more and more alcoholic and less and less sweet, as the yeast consumes the sugar. So while the children were allowed to drink it for the first few weeks after bottling, after a certain point it was distinctly adults-only. So it's quite possible that the parent simply left theirs to ferment too long.
...I used to make ginger beer, which is a variation on the same thing; you cultivate a yeast/bacteria/ginger culture used for the fermentation rather than relying on wild yeast, but the process is the same. Thing about ginger beer, though, is that it's heavily flavoured with ginger, and you need the sugar to make it drinkable. So if you left it for too long it ended up both extremely alcoholic and mouth-puckeringly bitter.
(I can strongly recommend giving ginger beer a try, actually. It's dead easy to make, exceedingly nice, you can pick any alcohol level you like including almost none, and is a continuation of a thoroughly ancient tradition. Be warned, though: (a) it's packed full of sugar, (b) it's quite hard to make in small quantities, and (c) if you get the bug you may find yourself surreptitiously exchanging jam-jars full of biological slime at pubs with total strangers...)
Lucky you didn't go blind
I'm sure you can find someone to take it off your hands (possible methanol aside...)
If you need someone to get rid of it I'll take it off your hands.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast has an episode on how drugs and alcohol affected some major historical events: http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-20-blitz-h...
As a home brewer, any of these styles, even 10% or higher is easily accomplished by any seasoned brewmaster. And for the quantity of beer brewed, and number of breweries, there must have been many. I must say that I cannot agree with the authors conclusion surrounding strong beer, as I have one in my fridge, made with barley and rye in the old way at 10.7 as determened by hydrometer. It kicks like a mule but is very drinkable.
10% is easy with modern equipment and yeast, but remember that pure yeast strains didn't exist until Emil Hansen isolated one at the Carlsberg Laboratory in 1883 [1]. In Early Modern times people used whatever yeast happened to grow locally, saved between batches as "barm" (flocculated yeast). Selection pressure with this propagation technique is primarily for flocculation ability, and it produces strains much more flocculant than wild strains. These strains have lower attenuation because they drop out of suspension before all the sugar is fermented. Try reaching 10% ABV with a traditional English strain like Fermentis Safale S-04 - it's pretty much impossible.
made with barley and rye in the old way
I'm assuming you're adding brewers yeast as well. My understanding is that beers made in this period where brewed purely with natural fermentation, making it much harder to reach these higher strength.
While I agree with you, people would often water down their beer and liquor, so the brewed strength is not necessarily what people drank.
(Second reply of mine, sorry).
Apparently one reason high ABV alcohol was hard was because yeast started dying off after 7%. A better source than I can be: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14fvf8/comme...
While I can't vouch for the comment itself, I can vouch for the availability of people on that subreddit to ask similar questions and demand sourced answers.
The author should try going to Belgium. In our recent trip to Brugge it was hard to find a beer under 10% and ones above that were common.
Are modern-day people perpetually drunk on mass-media opiates from consuming up to a gallon of behaviorally-engineered dopamine shots each day?
> Are modern-day people perpetually drunk on mass-media opiates from consuming up to a gallon of behaviorally-engineered dopamine shots each day?
Yes?
I have always noticed contradictions within the history of booze. I can't understand how anyone who has ever tried well-water can believe that misconception about choosing beer over water. Also, an old U.S. History textbook in high school suggesting to us that the Temperance Movement was a reaction to people suddenly discovering strong alcohol. This article confirmed my suspicions on both of those events.
> I can't understand how anyone who has ever tried well-water can believe that misconception about choosing beer over water.
But for urban folk in the middle of London, or New York, was the water they were consuming as fresh as what you're imagining when you think of "well water?"
Even if it was drawn from nearby wells, and not from dirty cisterns, was their sewage system good enough to keep it from getting contaminated?
I don't know so much about water cleanliness, and the article suggests it may not have been that dirty, but I wouldn't assume that it was all as clean as a perfect little rural well.
Well water? Early municipal water systems were disgusting. The stuff that flowed in through the taps was barely filtered and mostly untreated.
http://shifting-grounds.net/pre-history/water-condition.html
If it was a choice between bilge water and beer, I'd pick beer every time.
I grew up on well water. It was fine.
Problem is when it isn't fine, such as in an "urban" area where there's lots of people drawing water and lots of people dumping contaminants indiscriminately (common then).
They may have "discovered" strong drinks at a point when the expanding American corn-farming industry discovered that moving whiskey was a whole lot more profitable per volume than dried corn.
Very interesting read. Assuming I descended from these people, I wonder if I could build up such a tolerance, because it sure doesn't seem that way on the rare occassions I do drink.
Does anyone have links to a similar history of coffee? When and how it originated, effects it had on the people, etc.
I would really love to know the prevalence of liver disease then vs now. Because now it is apparently at a record high or so we are being told all the time.
I absolutely love that they're trying to reach a broader public engagement of their historical academic work through innovative events such as the pub nights. I mean it's pretty easy for this when your research is into brewing habits of early modern people but it marks a significant depature from the lofty circles of academia and helps to really engage Joe Public with historical research and academic discovery in an easily accessable way.
I think that's an absolutely fantastic goal to shoot for. Scientific (and in a broader sense, academic in general) outreach is really important and beneficial for society as a whole, so I'm only too happy to read about how some people are trying to do that!
> beer was more important as a source of energy (via calories both from grain and alcohol)
> they were likely to have been pushing for ‘sweetness and body’ rather than maximum alcoholic strength
So, basically, people drank beer like they drink soda-pop today, and wanted the same things out of it (sweet, fizzy, not necessarily alcoholic, goes well with food.)
Anyone know what those people of the Early Modern era had to say about coffee? Were people who drank coffee, but not beer, considered teetotalers?
"James S. goes on to point out that while you can achieve the percentages suggested by Craig using modern barley, malting techniques, yeast, and equipment, such ‘show-stopping’ figures were unlikely to have been achieved by even the commercial producers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."
This is a key point. Malting is tricky: The barley seed must be germinated, since the enzyme that converts starch to fermentable sugars is produced by the sprouting seed. Then the germinated seed must be sterilized in a way that prevents too much of the starch from being converted but also does little damage to the grain. This can be done with drying, toasting, and smoking, but it requires a lot of process control to get a uniformly "pale" malt rather than a darker caramel or chocolate malt where some of the starches and sugars have been caramelized.
The development and popularization of pilseners and other light, clear beers in the 19th century was driven by techical advances in malting. 18th century malts were certainly less advanced, more uneven in quality, with a higher proportion of caramelized and toasted sugars and consequently a lot of body and a lower alcohol content.
Reminded me of the theory that early humans ate tons of psychedelic fungus and that is what helped us create the neural pathways towards sentience. (if you think we are sentient now that is)
Between that, and the cannabis receptors in our brains, perhaps we're not supposed to be sober.
Maybe everything is going to shit in the world because we as a species are going through a collective withdrawal from the substances that made us in the first place.
Edit: I think this is the documentary that I saw that referenced weaker beer. http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/watch-video/#id=2082...
In my early 20s I could drink 5% ABV beer all day long and never get too drunk to pass a field-sobriety test.
This link is just timing out for me. HN hug of death?
How did they avoid massive weight gain?
TLDR:
* Because beer was consumed as a source of energy rather than as an alternative to water, and high alcohol content was favored, it seems like the answer is "Yes."
* However, it's unclear whether early brewers could make drinkable beer at high ABV, throwing this conclusion into doubt.
> Were early modern people perpetually drunk?
It's an idiotic premise. Turn up to work drunk and see how well you do.
Who the hell would want to do a labourer's job drunk.
Who would hire someone drunk?
Imagine the whole workforce drunk?
Even tipsy, seems worse, the afternoon sucks after lunch drinks.
I think if you look at current 3rd world countries they are not far off culturally to 'Early Modern People'
There's a huge crutch on alcohol, it kills a lot of people.
But most people are not drunk (or tipsy) most of the time.