It needs to be pretty strong to sterilize, way above strong red wine. Also the stronger it is the more it dehydrates you. So if you need to compensate sterile alcohol being drunk with unsafe water in some form, you still lose overall.

So no you can't satisfy your long term hydration needs by drinking anything strong enough to be safe by its alcohol content alone.

I cholera was the main problem and I think even a low % of alcohol would kill the bacteria

It wasn't just about the alcohol content, in the case of beer for example it was also about the brewing process involving sterilisation before that was widely being done to water, as well as the antiseptic properties of hops.

Look at it not from the angle of killing everything, but from the angle of how fast will trace amounts of life multiply in that environment. Absence of trace amounts wasn't really a thing before canning, which was at the stage of promising military prototypes during the Napoleonic Wars.

on our travel in SEA we always did bring with us some Hungarian palinka (50%+) and drank some after every meal. We have managed to avoid stomach issues.

Homebrewing wine made me suspicious of the claim that beer/wine were drank because the water supply isn't clean. The first thing you do is sterilise anything that will make contact with the liquid or it will spoil and be poisonous.

As a consumer one does not have to sterilize though, and that would be the advantage. That it tends to spoil very badly when not sterialized can be seen as a feature, it may act a detector for bacteria.

Maybe it helps that you sterilize a big batch once and then it stays safe indefinitely? I'd rather drink a 2 year old bottle of wine than a 2 year old bottle of lake water.

When your must or wort gets contaminated due to lack of sterilization it's unlikely to become poisonous. It's more likely to become vinegar. It's the fact that you're using uncontaminated fruit juice or boiled wort that makes the beer or wine safer to drink than water out of the cistern beside the outhouse.

It will not be poisonous. It will just taste sour.

You don't sterilize, you sanitize. There's a big difference.

I never understood the sterilizing theory, it coincides with the claims these times they also had mostly low alcohol types of beverages, such a beer and ale.

The sterilizing only really happens in modern wine level alcohol (14%).

You have to boil the water to make the beer.

I didn;t know to be honest. So good point, thanks for clarification.

However I dove into it, Boiling wasn't always easy, so they didn't always heat it properly for sterilization: https://byo.com/article/raw-ale/.

You have to boil the wort for hours otherwise it's not beer, it's porridge. It's that process that kills any pathogens, not the fermentation (obviously, since fermentation requires the presence of pathogens).

So boiling isn't strictly required, though it has nice benefits on the wort (in a phase called the "hot break"). However, it is necessary to reach certain temperature (140-160 F, though broader may work) to convert starch into sugar.

In old times, a metal vessel large enough to boil an entire batch of wort may not have been feasible. Other techniques were used in these cases.

Say you have a wooden barrel or tub:

* Take off a portion of the wort, boil it, and add it back. This is decoction.

* Heat rocks and add them into the wort.

> In old times, a metal vessel large enough to boil an entire batch of wort may not have been feasible.

Define 'old times'?

Eventually the most alcohol tolerant bacteria, the ones primarily fermenting the sugars, get killed by the alcohol itself (by denaturation, the alcohol makes the membranes soluble in water). At that point there are very few more alcohol tolerant bacterium.

Bacteria does not make alcohol. It is yeast, which is a fungus.

Ah true. I'm using the wrong family name.