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| This is the interior of an old inn in Bucharest, Romania. It is called "Caru cu bere" which may translate as "The Beer Wagon" Photo by Baloo69 on Wikimedia Commons may translate as |
Back in the day, they even made beer soup for the entire family; parents, grandparents, and kids were fed with beer soup.
Beer Soup Medieval Recipe (When beer was served for breakfast and beer bellies were well respected) This is an article I wrote last summer for Hubpages. It is a short history of beer mainly with the purpose of introducing an old beer soup recipe.
Today I want to speak about beer as a drink in the Middle Ages.
Now, we may think that centuries ago, the best drink for most people was water. And this is partially true. But we do not know that a better drink for our ancestors was beer. And it was quite common among people of all conditions and ages.
One reason they consumed beer was that the water was often impure, posing a health hazard. In this regard, beer was far healthier. The fermentation process of the grains destroys most of the harmful bacteria and other germs that may contaminate the water, so beer was a far more hygienic drink.
Beer was brewed by everyone. The earliest people we know today that they made this drink were Egyptians, some 2000 years B.C. It is said that Greeks and Romans liked wine, though they, too, knew how to make beer.
In the Middle Ages, beer was made at home by housewives, sold at taverns to customers, and in large commercial enterprises for mass consumption. It was so popular that it became the drink of the “common man,” with the largest consumption in German Countries, the Low Countries, and England. It was even a method of payment for workers.
Beer also had its rules and regulations in cities and monasteries, where monks got beer at strict ratios. In London, they had to limit how much water you could draw from a well or spring. (Because they would dry out the wells). In fact, some historians have said that, for the countries mentioned above, there was one brewery for every one hundred people. In this condition, it is no wonder that the municipality of London found them dangerous for the public water supplies.
Beer was not the only drink, though. They also made wine, especially in Greece, Italy, Spain, France, and other eastern and central European countries. With all these drinks, medieval people did not give up on water. But this may be my next subject.
I know that ale was the most common beer type of the Middle Ages with the ascendancy of the Lager to come later, so drinking cold beer probably wouldn't have been as prevalent as it is today. No doubt though, some beer would still have been preferred cold, even in the London taverns of Elizabethan times. So how did they go about keeping it cold?....leave kegs in The Thames?..Store them in caves?....Just a thought or two that occurred to me as I was reading this excellent little article. Must admit though, I like the idea of Medieval beer consumption: must have been quite a pickled populace.
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