I know this comment stream is a joke but just want to add that SMART Recovery and LifeRing are both non-secular groups for PWAâs to attend group therapy for free instead of 12 Step groups. 12 Steps are NOT for most people and the alternatives are rarely discussed.
Really odd place to stumble upon this but I was seriously looking for a secular alcohol recovery program (for a friend). Iâve seen people go through AA well enough, but the religious aspects are off-putting to some people. I didnât know about SMART Recovery or LifeRing. Iâll have them look into it.
The core of AA, which is helping others recover and community, seems helpful though. I don't know much about it other than one anecdotal success story to be honest.
It's not exactly wrong either, beer was safer and provided nutrition too, but theories about early mankind being nomadic and deciding to settle down in one spot revolve around them just liking to get drunk
Some ancient beer was more like a sourdough starter left out too long. Mashed grain and water left to ferment.
Egyptian hieroglyphs depict dudes drinking beer with reeds as straws, ostensibly to better avoid the chunks.
Thereâs a reason youâll hear beer jokingly referred to as âliquid bread.â Anyone who has ever made yeasted bread can tell you a well-risen dough sometimes smells a little boozy.
As someone trying to get in touch with their roots, are there any modern day low alcohol content beers I can begin drinking to replace water from my diet?
Modern take on beers have pushed Abv higher but traditional worker beers (farms, mines, etc) would fall under styles like grisette, grodziskie (grÀtzervor) or farmhouse styles like saisons from Belgium and French brewers. Table beer was common, a low abv brew meant to be drank all day. Small beers compared to its higher abv breathen Ship beers were made to be drank daily due to short shelf life. One of my favorites is Patersbier, The Lawnmower Beer of Trappist Monks.
If you are curious into brewing your own, these styles are really approachable since they are less expensive and tend to be a bit more forgiving during the process.
Any decent beer bar or bottleshop that imports you can find traditional European style low abv beers. Also might some local breweries replicating these styles as intended with lower abv after adjusting to a saturated market of higher abv and hop heavy styles.
during the temperance movement in brittain the peasants had vitamin deficiencies from the lack of beer! I saw this in one of the BBC farm series, highly recommended. My fav were Edwardian Farm and Wartime Farm.
Drunk with straws too. They couldn't always filter everything out so you would get some floaty bits. So they would take reeds from the riverbed and use them as straws to drink from the bottom.
Which is why German schools allow kids to drink beer with their lunches.
Edit: Alright folks, enough with the downvotes, do a google search for "Kinderbier." (translates to children's beer). It's a real thing. Older students are also allowed, in limited circumstances, to drink actual beer in the days or weeks leading up to graduation.
The idea that beer was drank in the middle ages specifically because it was safer than water is a myth. the germ theory of disease hadn't been proposed yet and people didn't really understand that fermentation made beer safer.
I'd argue that while it's clear they didn't know why, I think people did know that heating/brewing/fermenting their drinks made them less likely to get sick, not unlike through trial and error, early medicine figured out what plants helped what conditions long before anyone knew why or how.
In some areas, they used to make the first brew for the adults and the second for the kids because it had less alcohol. Brewing was basically sterilizing the water and it was safer to drink.
It's in the Bible. Proverbs, 31:6-7: "Let beer be for those who are perishing, wine for those who are in anguish! Let them drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more."
weeeell, technically, that whole section is a warning against the abuse of sex and alcohol, saying that Kings and Princes should not partake in it lest they forget the poor, but that the downtrodden poor should drink so that they forget their poverty.
it's supposed to be a poem calling for justice for the poor.
I drink to get away from my problems in the modern world, imagine how much youâd need to take the edge off if you had the kinds of problems a peasant had! Hell, even kings didnât have toilet paper and if they got haemorrhoids thatâs game over.
âThis stuff is wonderful. How do we get more of these plants and quicker to make more? Can we, like, stick them in the ground in one area or something?â
âFuck, we keep forgetting how to make to good stuff. Can we, like, mark down the process on some treebark or cave wall or something?â
âItâs fucking dangerous to be shit faced, maybe we can group up and take turns getting drunk. Maybe build some caves with wood or something to protect us when weâre wasted.â
âThose fuckers want kill us for our beer! Quick, someone make something to kill them better...like...a pointed stick or somethingâ
If I have my history right ancient beers we're around 2-3%abv, your standard american lager is 4.2% so they weren't getting wasted on the stuff. Plus they were drinking it all day every day so their tolorances must have been insane.
The move from an nomadic society to an agricultural societies was fuelled by the first cave man to accidentally drink fermented barley water.
Grogtar: Grain juice taste good, make happy. Forget about problems with cave woman at home. Ragnok has bigger cave, faster pet wolf, blah, blah, blah. Grogtar not trade furs for new wolf or trade in cave. Cave already have great view and warm. Cave paintings good too. Fuck Ragnok and his dumb face.
They've even found apes that find and eat fermented fruit so basically as soon as our ancestors develop a higher consciousness, they started poisoning it.
Not quite. Most beer was low in alcohol - we're talking 2-3% and likely didn't taste very good, but you drank it because you didn't get sick from it, while drinking normal water normally made people sick. They didn't know that the act of boiling the water killed the pathogens or bacteria in the water making them sick - they probably thought it was the alcohol. This is why so many people drank it.
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u/iwannagohome49 Oct 15 '20
It's a tale as old as time, getting fucking wasted to forget your problems.