I have heard that before pasteurization and other advances in germ theory it wasn’t uncommon for people to drink alcoholic beverages like beer or wine instead of water because the beer didn’t make them sick.
Does a beverage with a 5% alcohol content have enough alcohol to kill pathogens? Or was the beer considered safer to drink because during the brewing process pathogens were killed off by some method or another other than the ethanol (distillation, boiling, filtering, additives, etc)? I thought it took 60-70% alcohol to kill microbes.
It takes about 8 drops of chlorine to purify a gallon of water, about 20 of iodine to do the same thing to a gallon. So a gallon of beer at 5% would have about 4000-5000 drops of ethanol in it with about 500-600 drops per ounce. Is that enough ethanol to purify drinking water?
As a homebrewer, the way I’ve heard it is that nothing’s going to grow in there that will kill you. It might make you sick, though. Properly-brewed beer will have the yeast outcompeting the other microorganisms.
I think another thing about beer, though, is that you do provide microorganisms with the perfect growth medium, and bacteria/fungi can grow in there first, instead of in your body. So if you do get an infected batch, you’ll be able to see or smell it. Infected beer smells nasty, can get an odd scum layer on the top, or white patches/ropy globs, etc.
Finally, you boil the wort (pre-beer liquid) for a while before letting it ferment, hopefully killing most unwanted stuff in it, and then add hops, which have something of an antibacterial effect.
Oh, and homebrewed (and various microbrewed) beer has live yeast in it, so it’s not technically sterile even when it’s just fine.
Alcohol is a fairly lousy antiseptic, so even 100% alcohol won’t kill *all *microbes. But what you find is that the higher the concentration and the longer the exposure time, the more microbes will be killed. So 5% alcohol for 24 hours is often better than 80% for 30 seconds.
The second point to note is that active pathogens are much, much more sensitive than their spores. Spores in water will usually “hatch” after a few days at most, so if you leave your beer to ferment for a few weeks, the spores will germinate and then be killed by even very low alcohol concentrations.
While beer is often brewed from boiled water, it’s not any filtering or heating that makes the beer potable, it’s simply letting it sit long enough for the spores to break dormancy and be exposed to the alcohol.
The main thing to relaise here is that we are talking about killing pathogens living in water. We aren’t sterilising the water, we are reducing the live pathogen count. It’s much harder to kill spores and much harder to kill many non-pathogenic microbes, but just reducing the live pathogen load down to a level that the immune system can handle is much easier.
It takes a lot more than that to purify it. Those are the levels to render it potable, meaning it’s safe to drink. It’s still a long way from being pure water.
The beer that people were drinking was mostly small beer. The alcohol volume was closer to 0.5% than to 5%.
One thing I learned that surprised me was that at pubs in pre-indoor plumbing days they used to “wash” out cups and mugs by dropping them into a container of beer. Apparently it worked well enough for those purposes.
Ferret Herder hit the nail on the head. The entire process of beer making contributes to a drink that can not host anything that will hurt you. Even if there were some sort of bacteria contaminating the wort, yeast are vicious. They’ll kill anything else that tries to live in your beer. Sometimes they can be overpowered if the bacteria are numerous enough and you’ll get an infected batch. However, even that won’t hurt you. Some of them are considered to be quite tasty (belgian and sour beers, for example). The worst that beer will do is taste bad.
Beer’s nowhere near sterile. There are lots of yeasts floating around in most beers that aren’t pasteurized.
What made beer safe in the days before safe drinking water is that beer wort is boiled for an extended period (60-120 minutes) and then immediately fermented. The pH drops and the alcohol level rises, inhibiting bacteria and giving the yeast a leg up. Once the beer is fermented out, it has about 5% alcohol and a relatively low pH which is inhibitory enough against pathogenic bacteria to make it safe to drink.
Acetic acid bacteria and some lactic acid bacteria will still grow in beer, and while they may spoil the beer, they won’t hurt you.
If there is bad stuff in your beer you would probably notice it during fermentation. It is not just that some boiling goes on in beer making or that the alcohol has killed everything. I’m not convinced that boiling was used that much in alcohol production “in the old days” anyhow. You could be confident that the beer or wine was good because it had been sitting for a while and hadn’t blown up and there were no unusual smells coming off. Not so with water you just pulled from the well.
I doubt you’d have boiled wine, but in beermaking, boiling the barley would help get all of the flavor/sugar out of the grains, so at least one boil wouldn’t be far-fetched.
The more I think about it, the more I like the petri dish comparison. Instead of microorganisms hiding out and getting to reproduce in you, you’re giving any potential “bugs” a wonderful meal. If the beer turns yucky, you know that’s a bad batch. If not, hey, you can drink up!
Wine is not boiled but beer always has been. Hops do not provide any bitterness unless the wort is boiling when they are added as the alpha acids are not extracted. Without hop bitterness the beer will taste like sugar water.