April 2015 beer as a food source (Part 1)

Introduction

This is the first part of several (when writing this, the number is set) articles about using beer as a food source. They will most likely not be published in a row as I'm writing things that catch my interest for the moment.

This sounds great!

Well you might have to think on it again, using beer as a food source will not be the kind of beer you (most likely) prefer to drink. To imagine a cold, good tasting beer with 4-6% alcohol. Think of a beer that only contains about 0.5-1% alcohol, no hops or very little. Not much taste to it. Add room temperature to it. Then you will have the kind of beer that most people were drinking during the days as a food source. So no, it's probably not that amazing as it sounds. You will not be drunk all the time, it will not be a constant party.

Why did people drink beer basically every day?

Water was not that healthy and people didnt know that much about bacteria, but they did figure out that if you drank beer instead of water in some parts you didnt get sick. The reason that you boiled the water when making beer and thus killing the bacteria. They did figure out the consequences but not the reason until later. And imagine this, one of your neighbours was getting sick very often and he/she is not drinking beer while another is drinking beer and not water but never get sick. What would you do? The choice if farily simple.

What about the term "food source" then?

As we all know beer contains a lot of energy, hence the term beer belly which comes from drinking more beer and getting more energy than you use up. But in medieval times people were working more with their bodies and doing physical labour, which means using more energy. So bringing a big jar of beer (remember, its very weak so they wouldnt get drunk) instead of a big jar of water means that you get both water AND energy. And energy was needed, a lot of it. Some workers even got paid in beer or were entitled to 5 liters of beer per day. This shows how important it was and how much was used per worker per day.