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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 days 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 Age.
Now, we may think that centuries ago the best drink of majority of people was water. And this is partially true. But what we do not know is that a better drink for our ancestors was beer. And it was quite common among people of all condition and ages.
One of the reasons why they consumed beer was that the water was often so impure that was posing a health hazard. In this regard, beer was far more healthier. The fermentation process of the grains destroys most of the harmful bacterias 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 Age, beer was made at home by housewives, at taverns for customers, in large commercial enterprises for mass selling. It was so popular that it became the drink of “common man” with the largest consumption in German Countries, Low Countries and England. It was even a method of payment for workers.
Beer also had its rules and regulation in cities and monasteries where monks got beer on strict ratios. In London, they had to put a limit on how much water you can 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 no wonder why the municipality of London found them dangerous for the public water supplies.
Beer was not the only drink though. They also made wine, specially in Greece, Italy, Spain, France, and other countries around eastern and central Europe. 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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