All Things Considered, Is Beer Or Wine Better For A Whole (Ancient? European?) Civilization?

What’s changed? I mean, I get that quality control is better, pasteurization is now a thing, and the market is dominated by big national/international breweries as opposed to beer made locally. But has the product itself fundamentally changed in these ~200 years?

I would humbly submit that quality control and pasteurization alone constitutes big changes to the final product. A lot of Americans still brewed from home at the time and added ingredients like winter evergreens, rheumitism weeds (several North American plants believed to help with the inflammation of joints), horseradish, sweetfern, and other ingredients that people believed to have a medicinal quality or helped with flavor. Budweiser started using rice to produce their beer in 1876 because it’s supposed to provide a clearer product with a criper taste, so that’s another change.

And another big change is simply how we consume beer. John Adams, our second president, was thought of as a moderate drinker and he began each day by drinking a quart of cider. What we’d call hard cider today. Americans drank like fish. I wish I could find it, but I came across a letter from an Englishman visiting America circa 1830 and he was astonished by how much Americans drank. In my experience, most British people today think Americans are lightweights when it comes to drinking.

I’m not sure how true that is (and by that I mean how true the perception is, not your assertion that most British people believe it). In terms of liters of pure alcohol per capita per year, the UK averages out at 11.4 per year, #24 in the world, the USA at 9.8 per year, #45 in the world. I don’t have the math(s) skills to work out what percentage of difference that is. Not for nothing, Australians, oft portrayed stereotypically as drunkards, come in at 33 - less than the UK but more than the USA. Further, Americans quaff more beer (72.7 liters per person per year, #20 in the world) than Britons (70.3, #23), though obviously we’re pretty close.

I think the difference comes down to the fact that America probably has more teetotalers, and in particular teetotalers who are vocal about it, than the UK. We also have a higher drinking age (21 vs 18) and American parents are collectively severerly more uptight about underage drinking than British parents. Ditto our underage drinking laws.

Finally, I think it comes down to our history of Prohibition, Blue Laws about sale of liquor (or anything) on Sunday, dry counties, etc. Kind of a perception that lingers from history but is no longer true (similar to the American perception that the British have bad teeth).

I didn’t dig too deeply into the source material that Wiki cited, but I think what this table means by “pure alcohol” is a sort of value obtained by considering the amount of alcohol in beer and the amount of beer drunk, same for wine and same for liquor. And then they distilled (see what I did there?) it into a value for pure alcohol.

But I could be wrong.

The question here isn’t really an either or. If an excess of grain or fruit was available they’d be fermented into the most suitable beverage. Have grapes? Make wine. Have grain? make beer. I imagine wine was created first because it so easily makes a palatable drink just by sitting in a partially closed vessel. From that point on it’s going to be a matter of available resources.

Yes, if you pick some grapes, and they crush slightly, and sit around in a vessel, you will get a bit of wine. I routinely get hard cider just by leaving fresh, unfiltered apple juice sitting too long (pretty palatable hard cider, i might add) and ripe grapes will crush some under their own weight.

Birds sometimes get drunk from eating fermented grapes (and mulberries) still in the vine (tree).

I imagine our pre-human ancestors enjoyed fermented grapes, and intentionally prepared wine couldn’t have been developed much after pottery, if not before.

(Although i agree with @MrDibble that wine benefits from careful preparation, and would have inspired people to improve their technology. I’ve had a lot of homemade fermented beverages. The beer is always great. The cider is always tasty. The perry is always nice. The wine… varies a lot, and sometimes it’s reasonably good. Oh, and i don’t care for mead, even mead that I’m told is excellent.)

Right. And the technology improvements would be applied to the product based on the most available ingredients.

Bears and other animals get drunk from fermented products, too. I suspect we’ve evolved to tolerate sizeable amounts of ethanol for precisely this reason – the inebriation is a side-effect (0r benefit). But other alcohols are poisonous to us because our animal ancestors weren’t likely to encounter lots of, say. methanol in their food.

This description of how we came to encounter alcohol in our food and beverage is entirely reasonable, and makes me wonder, once again, why North American people did not, by and large, drink alcohol, and purportedly have a low tolerance for it. Labrusca grapes grew throughout the continent, as did other sugar-containing fruit suitable for making alcohol. airborne yeasts coat the outsides of such fruits. But the making and use of alcohol appears to be completely absent from the Eastern Woodland cultures. There was some use in the Southwest, but of a very restricted kind, and a little odd. The making of pulque requires the use of agave sap, and they used to produce it by chewing the plant and spitting the sap into containers. (Although evidently the sap can ferment inside the plant itself – but it’s not produced from a fruit.)

Blueberries, black cherries, mayhaws, and several other native american fruits can be used to make wine. So can cranberries, with some effort. Why didn’t the indians do this?

No, beermaking predates winemaking in the archaeological record - by 7 000 years.

I remember reading studies that wine did come first as Hunter/Gatherers could and did make wine. Finding cites for this will be hard though, as I suspect I read this back in the 80s or early 90s. Do you think I’m misremembering or is it worth pursuing?

I suspect this runs into the problem of projecting backwards from modern HGs, which isn’t a valid methodology.

Here, the HGs made mead, not wine.

The earliest beer was made by a HG culture, BTW.

Hard to trust my memory of an Anthropology 101 textbook from the 80s. Slight chance an issue of Scientific America from the same time period.

I there’s also a question of definition. How much do you have to process it for it to count as “wine”?

As @What_Exit has said, the archaeological record doesn’t go back far enough to determine the origin of fermentation to produce alcohol. It is far more likely that wine, distinguished from beer by the use of fruit instead of grain, was the earliest form. That doesn’t mean it led to any advances in fermentation products. The archaeological record becomes much clearer after the advent of agriculture where the technological advances could have made grain far more available to ferment, and led to the controlled environment to produce potable and desirable beer.

Fermentation happens naturally. That’s not winemaking, though. We can, in fact, pinpoint this kind of thing, because winemaking and beer making leave residues - for wine, the beeswing I mentioned before is diagnostic. And the residues for beer are older than those for wine.

Also, the oldest beer predates agriculture. The Natufians had a grain-centric diet way before they started farming.

I don’t disagree with that. But what specifically is meant by “Beer or Wine” in the thread is not clear.

The OP is clearly talking about both as agricultural products.

What bearing does that have on whether fruit or grain was first discovered to ferment?

How did they make the beer?

What’s the earliest wine making we know of, and how do we know?

You drop interesting hints, but i don’t have the background to fully understand what your are saying.

People explicitly knew the difference between other harmful and non-harmful things such as berries, roots and fungi, so I think it’s reasonable to infer that they might have noticed that the people who drank beer didn’t get sick like the people who drank from the pond.