You know, this is something people mention a lot on the internet since forever, and it reminds me of the assumption that mouthwash which is 20-25% alcohol must be for the purpose of killing germs.

However, I recently read something that claimed to debunk this, saying that even 50 proof is not effective at all at sterilizing things and it is merely a solvent for the active ingredients.

The reason I stumbled on it was because I'd been worrying about whether the alcohol free variants are effective, vs. alcohol potentially being a carcinogen.

So I think it's less obvious what effect 1% alcohol has than at first glance.

I did consider not posting that factoid. I had been a while since I double checked it. You're right, now that I think about it more. I'm inclined to no longer believe that statement to be true but I wonder if a single digit percentage of alcohol could be enough to stave off more advanced stages of exponential growth of bacteria for a meaningful amount of time like, say, a day.

Nevertheless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_beer

I always thought they were watering the beer down so you could drink it in place of water so you wouldn't be inebriated after breakfast.

It was debunked time and time again. People in ancient times drank water, it's just that reading ancient texts gave some historians the idea that people only drank beer, since that was the only drink they wrote about(well, along with wine). No one wrote about drinking water because there was no reason to write about it. But modern historians are very much certain that the "they only drank beer because it was safer" thing is a myth, we don't have any proof for that.