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].
One of my friends is a very dedicated home brewer, and he's recently taken an interest in a lost class of 2-3% beers that have fallen out of fashion.
There's also traditional ferments like Kvass or Brottrunk which are made from bread, have <1% alcohol and are very drinkable and can also make the foundation for a soup or other foods which need some quick flavor.
Makes me wonder a bit about just how much of that stuff I drank as a kid, because I certainly don't remember moderating myself then, either.
Iirc it was in earlier times marketed to ladies and also pregnant women because it is high in Vitamin B12(?) or something. Legend had it you wouldn't get rickets (bendy legs) if you drank sweet stout.
In Scandinavia lett øl (low alcohol beer) is in all the supermarkets, this is 2.5% alcohol pilsner.
Would explain a lot :D
Isn't that what a session beer is supposed to be?
Not sure there is anything commercially marketed that is under 3% ABV, really.
In Norway and Sweden beer under 2.8% is is exempt from most licencing and excise regulations. So there is large market for that sort of beer.
The ancester of carbonated soda, called «limonade» in France and given to kids cannot be naturally obtained without alchohol.
As an experience I did make some (water, citrus, a little exposition to air (thus yeast)) and anaeroby fermentation will give you the expected result: - an acid, sugarish refreshing drink - with bubbles, - and ~2-3% alcohol
My experiments confirm what is said on a chemistry forum. http://forums.futura-sciences.com/chimie/410527-limonade-art...
Kids, were given alcohol in the old days, no wonder why they were calmer, lol.
My look at older german polish recipies makes me suspicious that a common drink of the old ages their the «brotbier» (you put old bread in a jar of water and let it ferment in anaerobic conditions) should also have been alcoholized.
And yes without Chaptal (17g/l of sugar = 1% alcohol, how to dope your alcohol fast) (not Gay Lussac) obtaning strong alcohol is tough.
Root beer and Ginger ale are named as such for the obvious reason.
My small disappointment in the current fad of "hard" sodas is that they are often malt beverages/"distilled" beer at ~5% alcohol rather than, say, traditional recipes in the ~2-3% range.
It's common in England for pubs to have at least one bitter that is below 4%.
I live in Zürich now. The local lager's okay, but it's all lager, and it's all 5%, which is the upper limit of what I like. I miss good old fashioned ale.
Although honestly I don't think I'd want a session IPA at 4 or below. Most (though not all) session IPAs are pretty terrible at ~4.5. They'd probably taste like watery trash at 3.5.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_in_Australia#Market_chara...
BTW, was beer popular in USA at that time?
Mead was also drank but I'm not sure it's popularity. If you read Food in England by Dorethy Hartley; beet wine, turnip wine and carrot wine were all being made too. I have a recipe for parsley root wine that I keep meaning to try whenever I have them fresh from the garden.
My cider without chaptalisation can go to ~6%. (100g/l is what modern apple yields in sugar this 100g/17 ~ 5.8%)
Actual cider makers are owned by a few brands that can make cheaper cider that are horribly sugarish since the 90s.
Old «farmers» cider were more acid, astringent and strong.
No need to say, that farmers were no idiots and that the knowledge of adding more sugar to higher the degree of alcohol is known since the XIXth.
I have add access to «cidre fermier of the grandpa» that was 12%.
Opaque, whitish and making you cough.
That is how my cider is looking like, and how home made and «illegally sold under the mantel» ciders were.
The government is trying to kill the taste of traditional products for the profit of big shitty brands. But the gustative resistance is all over the country since decades.
We will not bow down, and will keep on making bread, hams, alcohol, choucroute, pickles and jams in our homes.
https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Want-Do-Illegal-Stories/dp...
They are scared of everything, making blood wurst the traditionnal way (by taking blood, spices and milk) is forbidden!
They almost pasteurize everything, even the cheeses !
And god curse the queen, Québec has awesome cheeses better than most UK and germany.
Cheesus God! I don't want to take part in the global fight against tasty food!
Tripes, boundins, alcohols, bagels, couscous, kebab, pierogi, pizza, bo bun and so much more should be the symbol of a new generation, giving up on flags for the profit of what should really unite us: happy fooding!
Alcoholic cider is one of the easiest things to homebrew, and was indeed something of a common beverage. To my grandfathers and great-grandfathers, brewing cider was an act of home rebellion, a reminder of how simple and commonplace alcohol can be. During the American Prohibition cider brewing was seen as a slippery slope to bootlegging and moonshine. (Partly because it was.)
I think America is still recovering from a lot of Prohibition-era anti-cider bias. There are still a lot of people that seem to think that making home ciders is dangerous and a quick way to die, even as there is an incredible movement overall in homebrewing beers these days. In some states, from what I recall, it may even still be the case that homebrewing cider is technically illegal.
No resistance, he just did what stubborn persons are making ; his own cider at industrial scale for him. I think he actually ended up being a legal moonshiner (bouilleur de crue).
Incidently, I am gonna point at Vermont and Québec that are 2 of my favourite north American regions because they so love great food :
- Québec cider industry is making awesome apple wine, and some heirs of french traditions are going back to making french ciders (I prefer the québecan apple wine) that are delightful;
- Vermont and Québec are pushing towards high quality food;
- Washington wines deserves to be given a thumb up for their quality (ontario/niagara wines are interesting too);
- Québec is beginning to produce amazing high quality stuff in Gaspésie (charcuterie, sparkling wines, veggies...)
My staying in Canada has been enlightened by the discovery of great food coming from unexpected places, and the rebirth of old awesome traditions. I even tasted close to medieval french recipes and it actually brought tears to my eyes. (When it comes to food, I have a problem)
And I also remember eating in PA in an amish place where food was way above standards.
The cliché of America being an underdeveloped gastronomical country is a lie. Even the tacos in Miami (FL) bouibouis are awesome.
United tastes of (diverse) foods (and alcohol)!
We cannot hate people with food we want to eat!
Not so sure already.
Much of lipid and protein catabolism also does not rely on glucose as an intermediate. Everything that doesn't get converted to glucose first will get converted to acetyl-CoA (glucose catabolites turn into this too) for use in the Krebs cycle.
Edit: I should have read TFA before commenting.
The system that eventually extracts energy from glucose (the citric acid cycle, also called the Krebs cycle) is involved, after the liver converts the ethanol.
If you look back far enough, some early brewing, like that of ancient Egypt, made beer so thick that mugs would often come with straws built into them so people could get past the thick layer of almost-solid grains that would float to the top.
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
Or a couple of pints. So that's lunch - did they not drink in the evenings in those days?
I don't know which is worse for a kid, on average: a light buzz on most days, or getting sick from drinking tainted water.
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?
I vaguely recall reading that the ancient Persians would make decisions twice: once sober, and once drunk. If their decisions were the same, then they knew that they'd decided correctly. Of course, they ended up being conquered by a bunch of teetotallers …
No reference, I'm afraid. It could be very well be total bunk.
http://skepticalphilosopher.blogspot.com/2009/09/persian-str...
Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/chimpanzees-...
Here's also an extract from a BBC Nature documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSm7BcQHWXk
Apparently, the monkeys are divided among heavy drinkers, occasional drinkers or teetootalers in proportions that are roughly equal to those among human beings.
Also, many 'native' peoples in the Americas, Australia, and Oceania have large problems with alcohol abuse. Large areas of Queensland forbid any ethanol, even for medicinal use, because of these social problems.
But I like your way of thinking. As they say, reality is a terminal condition caused by a lack of alcohol, or something something.
In the UK it was lowered a year ago to a recommended 14 units per week (UK units - "14 units is equivalent to a bottle and a half of wine or five pints of export-type lager (5% abv) over the course of a week") [1]. CDC website says "According to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans,1 moderate alcohol consumption is defined as having up to 1 drink per day for women and up to 2 drinks per day for men. This definition is referring to the amount consumed on any single day and is not intended as an average over several days." [2]
Actually, there's a Wikipedia page with various countries' guidelines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recommended_maximum_intake_of_...
[1] http://www.nhs.uk/news/2016/01January/Pages/New-alcohol-advi... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/faqs.htm#moderate
For some conditions, like some cancers, the risk increases even at very low levels of alcohol consumption (less than 1 drink).
https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/moderate-drinking.ht...
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?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/31/russian-men-lo...
The English, on the other hand, get completely hammered.
The Romans had trouble instilling their calm Mediterranean cafe culture in the gray and frigid binge-drinking north. It's an environmentally inspired culture difference that goes back thousands of years, so it's hard to draw a conclusion about drinking and humans as a whole.
Edit: so it's 3.5 oz, not shots. Also, mmmmm whiskey.
Sure, more than today, but not remarkably so:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_c...
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...
(Unfortunately, the line fell in about two days, and HK in less than two weeks, Christmas 1941...)
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#...