Modern people drunk a lot, event recently. In France, 80 years ago, kids would drink wine at school.
Drink and driving prevention and repression certainly played a big part in it.
But I think other factors came at play:
- Science. We know now better about the effect of alcohol. This drove the public opinion into a certain direction. Having the general acceptance this was a bad idea created policies to prevent things like having wine in schools in 1956: https://expat-in-france.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/wine-...
- Hygiene. If you can drink water safely from the tap, it helps.
- Moving to a service based society. If you don't have to work in a mine, you drink less.
- Other drugs came around. The ones you identify as such. And the one that are more innocent, like sugar, tv shows and social medias.
A big shift was also coffee. Works much better for focus work, and also gives a slight high (big in the beginning).
The coffee & alcohol cycle is also an interesting one in the West
High paced work environment & coffee jacking up your nervous system, and then in the evening using alcohol to calm it down (or other calmers like weed or painkillers).
Don’t know if there is much evidence, but I have heard that the switch from the main consumed beverage from alcohol based drinks to caffeine based drinks may have possibly contributed to the Enlightenment.
Europe went from a depressant to a stimulant, suddenly lots of science.
> coffee jacking up your nervous system, and then in the evening using alcohol to calm it down (or other calmers like weed or painkillers).
I've heard that green tea can calm down the effects of caffeine (despite containing a bit of caffeine itself). Something to try if you don't want to give up coffee like me.
I have been maca and L-theanine jacking with the effect the focus lasts longer than with caffeine. My bias is that I have ADHD and now use a MAO inhibitor nootropics approach combined with Maca
They tested it out and the test was successful. The kids preferred beer to sugary drinks. The beer was much weaker than what adults are accustomed to at 1.5% to 2% alcohol.
That main ban is for purchasing alcoholic beverages. Adults in France can buy alcohol and serve it legally to their children. Same in Belgium, until 2010 it was even allowed to serve drinks to children in bars providing that adults where present and buying the drinks.
I don't get some countries or people that forbid alcohol until you are 18 or 21. I drank beer when I was 8 and got totally drunk at 14. Which was a good thing, because it was at home and, well, lesson learned. Starting with alcohol when going out at 18 or 21 sounds much more dangerous.
Sorry for off-topic, but I must say this. Sugar is the worst substance for public health ever. It's literally poison. Modern society is mostly cured of diseases of the old, but it's littered with the chronic diseases (which medical science pretends to solve by sympomatic treatment) whose only cause is sugar. I abandoned sugar cold-turkey after watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM, and am thankful to God that I was only 18 when I watched it. And no, FDA says it won't do anything about sugar, see the video.
Cost as well; water is dirt cheap (for now anyway, there's potable water shortages in plenty of places and that will become a worldwide issue soon enough), anything alcoholic has become more and more expensive for various reasons, including but not limited to taxes + extra "discouragement" taxes, at least where I live. Drinking is an expensive hobby, to the point where weed is cheaper and has less side effects if the purpose is to alter your state of mind a bit.
Lack of potable water will never become a worldwide issue. The lack of water which could become a worldwide issue is water for agriculture which causes starvation in poor countries which in turn causes refugee crises and wars. Lack of potable water will remain a very local issue even under very dire scenarios for global warming.
I am not sure if science as we understand it had so much to do with it.
To my experience, society changed enough to no longer tolerate--or at least accept as normal- drunken family members. There was a point where the always-drunken-grandfather was suddenly considered ill and no longer just a little weird. A noticed this in my own family when I was still young. There was a point where constant-drunkenness was suddenly frowned upon with a certain vigor. And the younger generation sort of got the message: "I dont want to be like grandpa, he is actually a poor devil..."
To be clear, this wasn't just suddenly frowned upon. "Drunks" have been looked down on and/or overindulgence considered bad or sinful since -- I don't know -- the Greeks and Romans, certainly Christianity.
> If you can drink water safely from the tap, it helps.
It's worth remembering that alcohol sterilizes many otherwise dangerous things. Being drunk all the time can easily be better than being sick all the time.
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%).
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.
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.
70? Nope, it still happened in the seventies, been there, done that. My parents didn't like it, but my aunt had a bottle and sometimes gave me a shot. It was a very light drink, though, no high.
What people here would find unbelievable is how much we drank as teenagers. I remember drinking mixes (double shot of hard liquors, like gin, with soda) as soon as 14 and they would serve us openly in bars. Different times.
"If you don't have to work in a mine, you drink less."
Uh...if you have to work with the public, or incompetent people, you may be driven to drink more. The people who work in infosec seem to be the drunkest I know. They do mostly leave it for after work though, because it has gotten quite easy to do sobriety tests on people that are more than subjective.
Currently, alcohol consumption is quite unevenly spread: an 80/20 rule applies I think (and in my country, it's the higher educated who drink most). I wonder if this was true in the past, where beer might have been the only way to drink uncontaminated liquids.
Beer being a way of drinking uncontaminated water is a myth that somehow sticks around, similar to the belief that people in the middle ages thought the world is flat.
Fresh water outsiderof cities was abundant, and inside cities there was usually a system of wells, often running water wells at that.
> - Science. We know now better about the effect of alcohol. This drove the public opinion into a certain direction. Having the general acceptance this was a bad idea created policies to prevent things like having wine in schools in 1956: https://expat-in-france.com
Not buying it. Common sense has always been enough to see the downsides of alcohol. If people dont care about losing motor functioning and having a painful hangover right now they wont care about a chance they will have liver problems in 40 years.
I think a bigger thing is the transition from labor oriented work to intellectual work. Not hard to roof a house drunk. But its pretty hard to make spreadsheets drunk.
As long as it only affects you, I think you should do whatever you want. But you are conflating "society" with "individual" here.
If a lot of people smoke, then a lot of them develop respiratory (and other) problems. So a lot more people need treatment, which could have gone to other patients. At that point it is no longer an individial situation which affects only you, it's a societal problem. Societies which don't address their problems eventually fade out.
We're doing a lot less of "society as babysitter" now. The ability of people to be open about being gay, trans, non-religious, Jewish, mixed-race, and left-handed are all examples of society no longer caring about things it once pried into deeply.
Raised by alcoholics during the Mad Men days so in reaction I never drank at all. My parents didn’t set a great example. I spent many an hour with a bag of library books outside bars while they boozed it up.
Reminded of a slightly less dignified politician: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/aug/09/thatcher.williamh... "Hague: I drank 14 pints of beer a day" - brand not specified, but if we take as "standard pre-CAMRA british beer of the time" Watneys Red Barrel at 3.8% that should give you an idea. He is also accused of exaggerating wildly; to me one pint an hour while doing manual work seems plausible-to-high for someone who's built up a tolerance.
Americans should probably date "stopping being drunk all the time" to Prohibition; the overwhelming national support for it, especially from newly enfranchised women(+), gives an idea as to how big a problem it was.
(+) As a non-American, I had to check this, and Prohibition very slightly pre-dates universal votes for women although both were in 1920 and it may be possible that the franchise differed by state? It's certainly true that women temperance campaigners were very important, given the role of alcohol in domestic violence and budgeting.
Universal prohibition (18th amendment) predates universal suffrage (19th amendment) by a few years, but the two movements had a lot of overlap, and women did widely support the idea and were used to motivate the concept. That said the two are not everywhere the same: the South was had more support for prohibition than suffrage and the west was much more for the right to vote than banning whisky. But also prohibition in the US goes back much farther. Toqueville mentions the idea favorably, many religious movements advocated some form of it (Mormons, shakers, Mennonites,…), and most eastern states still retain a variety of blue laws that restrict alcohol sales and several colleges still retain local prohibitions from 150 years ago.
It's good to note that tolerance to alcohol is bad. It means your body has been damaged and is no longer responding to alcohol as it once did, to protect your organs.
edit: I should also note tolerance to alcohol is a warning that much greater problems are imminent. It is a red flag.
There's an interesting episode of "In Our Time" about the "temperance" movement in the late 1800s, primarily in the UK but also a little in the US. It was a much milder version of the sentiments that eventually (in the US) led to Prohibition. In Our Time makes it sound more like an early self-help movement.
ps. there's also some fascinating speculation at the end about connections between the temperance movement and early movements for women's rights and how that played out very differently on each side of the Atlantic.
My grandfather had a worker who’s was drunk all the time. my grandfather would pick him and drop him off and always paid his wife. This would end sometime in the 50’s.
Less liquor and much of the beer was whats called small beer or table beer and had very low ABV between 0.5 and 2.0%. George Washington in particular was fond of brewing a bran and molasses based small beer.
This was my understanding too, but the article in the first footnote uses some much larger values for alcohol content. It generally seems well sourced but these numbers are all over the place as if the author first got the numbers and then randomly placed the decimal point and termed some of them 'percentages'.
> Wine is taken to be 0.12 alcohol, the same number is used in modern estimates of alcohol consumption. The amount of alcohol consumed by drinking historical beer brews is between 0.62 to 0.107, the % of alcohol in “small beer” is taken to be around 0.05 and the % in “strong beer” is taken to be around 0.135,
It was 4.5L per day though. Enough to stupefy any man or keep them drunk all day.
"For sailors the beer supplied was of the strong kind (10%-15% alcohol) since this was the only kind that preserved itself well in the sea, hence drunk as a sailor."
How did they brew such small beers? Nowadays the non-alcoholic beers (basically 0.5%) are mostly made by removing alcohol after brewing, which greatly affects the taste. I think it's a highly desirable skill to be able to brew good small beers. (Or maybe those beers were just not very good by today's standards.)
I've just finished Pamuk's novel A Strangeness in my Mind, where the protagonist is a street vendor of the traditional Turkish beverage boza. Boza is a mildly alcoholic fermented barley drink considered ok for Muslims to drink. The gradual disappearance of boza sellers in the street is an index of the changes in Istanbul and Turkish society in the late 20th century, really enjoyable book. From what I've read I can imagine it's an acquired taste.
Relatedly I learned the other day how Washington kept some men in captivity who he forcibly took teeth from to cobble together from different men’s oral wounds his famous dentures. Interesting
"Take his entry for the night of 16 October 1783. Boswell records that he and six friends consumed 11 bottles of claret, two of other wines, two of Madeira, three of port, and one of rum. The next night, they polished off 11 bottles of claret, three of other wines, three of port and three of rum."
My sibling from another set of alcoholic parent(s)! I too never drank, because of my father's negative example. I tell people "My dad drank enough for the both of us."
Given the importance of the "gnôle" (a french word for a often home or clandestinaly made strong spirit in France) in rural parts of France to this day [1][2], I am pretty sure the author is underestimating the importance of spirits in history.
[1] usually mixed with coffee several times during the day, and very often a shot glass in the evening
[2] I've never seen a sober postman when I visited my grand parents as a kid in the 80's and 90's. Back in the days they weren't timed and would be invited for a coffee at every single farm they visited to talk about the news of the day. He really served as a local and vocal newspaper for all of them. The coffee itself wasn't strong in cafeine, but was almost always served with "la goutte", a small but significant amount of spirit.
I remember reading a letter from an Austrian Trappist abbot, from Bosnia in 19th cetury, to his friend in Austria. The letter was mostly complaining about locals excessively drinking plum brandy. He had cut down all the plum trees on church land. Forbade coming drunk to mass, but then people would just get drunk after mass. Founded the first brewery in Bosnia to get the people to switch to beer. Even set up a fruit dryer so that the church would dry the plums for free so that the people did not have to make brandy out of it come winter. In January, a "jolly company" from the village came to visit him thanking him for the the dry plums. Usually by this time they would run out of brandy, now they had dry plums and were making it from them.
It also depends of the region you live in. In Brittany for example people drunk a lot of watery wine and sweet cider but they drunk it in quantity for some of them.
You canread in Jean-Marie Deguinet's "Mémoires d'un paysan bas breton" (19th centuary) that people were drinking a lot of cider and particulary his wife who was a cider Alcoholic.
The gnole as you speak is more something that became popular amongst the Poilu during the first world war and after, I'm not sure if there was loads of people drinking it in the past but it feels like the spirits became more popular by the end of the 20th centuary.
My grandfather had a cider brewery and even the apple juice he made had a bit of alcohol from fruit fermentation. Something below 1% though so we drank it as kids.
I would say in the case of cider you have to drink an awful lot to feel intoxicated, you definitely suffer from diarrea before you feel the alcohol.
Isn't [2] what happens in Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis? Postman is drunk every day at work, and his new boss thinks he's got a drinking problem. Turns out he gets served, or even forced to drink a nice glass of liquor at every stop.
I don't like writing the obvious things that everybody always says, but here we are, nobody has said it yet:
there was a book or paper out like 25 years ago that speculated that as the Age of Enlightenment coincided with the start of European tea and coffee drinking, the general uptick in the usage of stimulants instead of alcohol must have contributed to the intellectual flowering through to the Renaissance, at least for the literate classes.
So that's when one group of people stopped being drunk all the time.
That's the difference between a sufficient condition and a necessary condition. It's likely a combination of factors were required that might not have been available in other places. But there were something akin to renaissances in other places before Europe, but changing environments/factors limited their impact or spread, or even outright ended them.
I always find the argument "but why didn't this happen elsewhere" bizarre, when ... it usually has happened elsewhere. Ignorance isn't a great argument. Like, other places often had sewers and other sanitation long before Europe, which implies that alcohol could have been a limiting factor for Europe while not being a limiting factor elsewhere.
There is something really special about European development. Chinese history is absolutely fascinating with a lot of super cool inventions, but nothing stands close to European history and it's power.
I remember a similar read. I think it also helped that armies become more disciplined, could march longer (coffee was a stimulant vs. alcohol), also the workforce had fewer errors. Any chance that somebody knows the reference?
Industrial-revolution machines were often very angry dragons, requiring constant supervision and attention to avoid explosions or loss of limbs. That must have played a part.
Also, industrialization saw the rise of the skilled workforce. People started earning more the more they could use their brain. It makes sense that they wouldn't want to numb it as much as they did before.
I worked in a factory when I was still in school in the 90s. I had to put some metal parts into an injection moulding machine every 21 seconds for 2 stretches of 4 hours with a 45 minute break between. If I missed the 21 second deadline the machine stopped, a yellow light flashed and the foreman shouted at me.
There was a switchboard with buttons for emergency breaks (e.g.toilet break). If you used it the machine stopped, a yellow light flashed and the foreman shouted at you.
I don't write this to complain, actually for me doing this for a couple of weeks during summer recess was quite fun. After this experience I also totally see how you just cannot do a job like that for 40+ years without alcohol.
I did something similar in the early 90s, placing parts into various machines (produced 15000 welding tips in one summer).
At that factory drinking previously had been common among workers. They banned alcohol during weekdays after one worker fell into a spinning milling machine. But even after that those workers who came in on Saturdays were allowed to consume a limited quantity of beer.
> Also, industrialization saw the rise of the skilled workforce. People started earning more the more they could use their brain.
Not neccessarily. The whole Luddite revolution/movement was trying to fight industrialization _because_ it required less skills, and reduced workers' wages. For example, before the automatic looms were introduced, cloth was produced by hand, by people of significant dexterity and skill. After automation, it was mainly produced by machines which needed only very basic (and low paid) human input here and there.
You make a good point, skilled craftsmanship definitely saw a dive, and certainly factory workers didn't need to be as skilled. But, big picture, each individual became vastly more productive thanks to industrialisation, which made room for more people to get educated and have more intellectual professions (which I think is what OP meant by "skilled", since he made reference to "using their brain"). All in all, I think that the net proportion of skilled labour grew significantly.
Maybe industrialization reduced wages for some craftsmen who were forced to become factory workers. But for almost all new factory workers their wealth, working conditions and working hours were a huge step up from their previous occupations as sheep herders, unskilled agri-labourers and subsistence farmers (with side hustles in proto-industrial home work).
Pretty soon the demand (and pay) for skilled craftsmen rocketed back up because the newly affluent workers could now afford to buy more items and some of those were not yet mass-producable.
Life was harsh, lots of work was physically taxing (no machines to do the heavy lifting), and there was not much in terms of relief for any sort of chronic or recurring pain, like back pain, tooth aches etc.
Alcohol helps endure, as it made you more numb to such pains. It might also help you sleep at night, when otherwise your aching body might have kept you awake.
In some physical jobs like the construction business, workers used to rely on alcohol to make through the work day until very recently. In some countries they might even still do so.
I can confirm from my own experience building a house and doing heavy lifting on the construction site, that after 10 hours of taxing work, an evening beer works wonders to relax your strained muscles and regain some feeling of comfort.
It's no surprise to me, that the reduction in alcohol consumption coincides with a switch from more hard physical labor, to more sitting jobs.
There's a vast scientific literature suggesting that even small amounts of alcohol have adverse side effects on sleep. Sleep is the biggest factor in muscle recovery and in reducing inflammation. Therefore the best thing one could do for themselves to accelerate physical recovery would be to drink plenty of water and make sure they get enough hours of sleep.
I think it's a bit like how I crave ice cold Coke when I'm thirsty on a hot summer day but then when I just drink tap water that craving reduces significantly. Therefore I know that my body really needed water but my brain translated in into a craving for Coke. There might be some similar learned behaviours between hard labourers and beer.
I would like to see a comparison with Asia, where people discover earlier that you can boil water to kill dangerous pathogens, even if they didn't know what pathogens were yet.
Hippocrates recommended that water be boiled and strained to purify it. People in the middle ages boiled, filtered, and even distilled water to purify it.
The catch is that without germ theory, people mostly did this process to water which was obviously contaminated. If water looked clean and tasted clean, why purify it? Even people who should know germ theory still make this mistake—people who go backpacking will take water from a clear stream and drink it, unaware that there is a beaver dam upstream and giardia in the water.
In many ways it filled (and still does, as does coffee) many of the same roles as alcohol. Certainly not the partying aspect, but as a beverage to have with food, relax or socialise with. Alcohol was consumed a lot more often in those more mundane contexts before.
As a younger engineer, I had very good times working in Central London and getting hammered with colleagues two nights a week on the regular. With tons of people from other companies at the pub too. I'm all in with remote work but that was pretty nice.
It's the thing I miss most about working in the office. We would take an extra long lunch almost every Friday at a local bar down the street, then come back to the office and mostly work on skunkworks projects. Some of our most creative stuff came from those Fridays.
Now my Fridays are filled with the same monotony as the rest of the work week.
When I started working in the 90s, pub lunch was still everyday, when I started doing consultancy, my mentor loved to take out customers for lunch on expenses. He knew which pub in every town had a lock in as well so it meant late nights too.
I soon stopped drinking at lunch though, never do it anymore, never got much work done in the afternoon and made me a bit too aggressive..
Multiple colleagues here in the UK have told me stories about spending time working with Americans and realising their drinking habits around work made them look like alcoholics to the Americans. It's going away with younger generations.
Readit News
Drink and driving prevention and repression certainly played a big part in it.
But I think other factors came at play:
- Science. We know now better about the effect of alcohol. This drove the public opinion into a certain direction. Having the general acceptance this was a bad idea created policies to prevent things like having wine in schools in 1956: https://expat-in-france.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/wine-...
- Hygiene. If you can drink water safely from the tap, it helps.
- Moving to a service based society. If you don't have to work in a mine, you drink less.
- Other drugs came around. The ones you identify as such. And the one that are more innocent, like sugar, tv shows and social medias.
The coffee & alcohol cycle is also an interesting one in the West
High paced work environment & coffee jacking up your nervous system, and then in the evening using alcohol to calm it down (or other calmers like weed or painkillers).
Europe went from a depressant to a stimulant, suddenly lots of science.
I've heard that green tea can calm down the effects of caffeine (despite containing a bit of caffeine itself). Something to try if you don't want to give up coffee like me.
Otherwise, you are right. The main ban (children under the age of 14) was in 1956, or 67 years ago.
They tested it out and the test was successful. The kids preferred beer to sugary drinks. The beer was much weaker than what adults are accustomed to at 1.5% to 2% alcohol.
I don't get some countries or people that forbid alcohol until you are 18 or 21. I drank beer when I was 8 and got totally drunk at 14. Which was a good thing, because it was at home and, well, lesson learned. Starting with alcohol when going out at 18 or 21 sounds much more dangerous.
It certainly is not here in Austria. 17 year olds drinking beer between their late afternoon classes is not unheard of and often tolerated.
I finally understand this phrase! "I worship God and I'm His slave" just never seemed to ring any bells.
To my experience, society changed enough to no longer tolerate--or at least accept as normal- drunken family members. There was a point where the always-drunken-grandfather was suddenly considered ill and no longer just a little weird. A noticed this in my own family when I was still young. There was a point where constant-drunkenness was suddenly frowned upon with a certain vigor. And the younger generation sort of got the message: "I dont want to be like grandpa, he is actually a poor devil..."
Deleted Comment
It's worth remembering that alcohol sterilizes many otherwise dangerous things. Being drunk all the time can easily be better than being sick all the time.
The sterilizing only really happens in modern wine level alcohol (14%).
So no you can't satisfy your long term hydration needs by drinking anything strong enough to be safe by its alcohol content alone.
https://elpais.com/gastronomia/el-comidista/2015/11/11/artic...
In Spanish, but if you are a French speaker you might get some hints.
Ad from 1961:
https://verne.elpais.com/verne/2014/10/13/articulo/141317743...
What people here would find unbelievable is how much we drank as teenagers. I remember drinking mixes (double shot of hard liquors, like gin, with soda) as soon as 14 and they would serve us openly in bars. Different times.
Uh...if you have to work with the public, or incompetent people, you may be driven to drink more. The people who work in infosec seem to be the drunkest I know. They do mostly leave it for after work though, because it has gotten quite easy to do sobriety tests on people that are more than subjective.
Less so in tech-heavy Utah, I imagine.
Fresh water outsiderof cities was abundant, and inside cities there was usually a system of wells, often running water wells at that.
If you don't have to work in an 1800s-England-style coal mine, sure. Modern mining is a high risk occupation with stringent controls on intoxicants.
University students are adults though, so that's not that surprising? (Well, Americans are a bit of an outlier with their 21 drinking age)
Here in north if we drink during lunch, we keep going.
Unless you are a software dev...
I'm one of those persons that think this is a luxury job.
Not buying it. Common sense has always been enough to see the downsides of alcohol. If people dont care about losing motor functioning and having a painful hangover right now they wont care about a chance they will have liver problems in 40 years.
- Society is now expected to be your babysitter. If your actions have negative consequences, they should have been forbidden and prevented.
If a lot of people smoke, then a lot of them develop respiratory (and other) problems. So a lot more people need treatment, which could have gone to other patients. At that point it is no longer an individial situation which affects only you, it's a societal problem. Societies which don't address their problems eventually fade out.
It's not babysitting, it's self-defense.
But I often think about the framers of the Constitution drinking vast quantities that fateful, blistering summer of 1787: http://johnjayhomestead.org/wp-content/uploads/In-the-Cups-o...
They were, and remain, literally some of the most functional human beings in history.
Fascinates me to see these two extremes in behavior.
Americans should probably date "stopping being drunk all the time" to Prohibition; the overwhelming national support for it, especially from newly enfranchised women(+), gives an idea as to how big a problem it was.
(+) As a non-American, I had to check this, and Prohibition very slightly pre-dates universal votes for women although both were in 1920 and it may be possible that the franchise differed by state? It's certainly true that women temperance campaigners were very important, given the role of alcohol in domestic violence and budgeting.
edit: I should also note tolerance to alcohol is a warning that much greater problems are imminent. It is a red flag.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0013zl8
ps. there's also some fascinating speculation at the end about connections between the temperance movement and early movements for women's rights and how that played out very differently on each side of the Atlantic.
> Wine is taken to be 0.12 alcohol, the same number is used in modern estimates of alcohol consumption. The amount of alcohol consumed by drinking historical beer brews is between 0.62 to 0.107, the % of alcohol in “small beer” is taken to be around 0.05 and the % in “strong beer” is taken to be around 0.135,
"For sailors the beer supplied was of the strong kind (10%-15% alcohol) since this was the only kind that preserved itself well in the sea, hence drunk as a sailor."
How did they brew such small beers? Nowadays the non-alcoholic beers (basically 0.5%) are mostly made by removing alcohol after brewing, which greatly affects the taste. I think it's a highly desirable skill to be able to brew good small beers. (Or maybe those beers were just not very good by today's standards.)
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvass
"Take his entry for the night of 16 October 1783. Boswell records that he and six friends consumed 11 bottles of claret, two of other wines, two of Madeira, three of port, and one of rum. The next night, they polished off 11 bottles of claret, three of other wines, three of port and three of rum."
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2004/dec/19/unitedkingdom...
[1] usually mixed with coffee several times during the day, and very often a shot glass in the evening
[2] I've never seen a sober postman when I visited my grand parents as a kid in the 80's and 90's. Back in the days they weren't timed and would be invited for a coffee at every single farm they visited to talk about the news of the day. He really served as a local and vocal newspaper for all of them. The coffee itself wasn't strong in cafeine, but was almost always served with "la goutte", a small but significant amount of spirit.
The gnole as you speak is more something that became popular amongst the Poilu during the first world war and after, I'm not sure if there was loads of people drinking it in the past but it feels like the spirits became more popular by the end of the 20th centuary.
I would say in the case of cider you have to drink an awful lot to feel intoxicated, you definitely suffer from diarrea before you feel the alcohol.
there was a book or paper out like 25 years ago that speculated that as the Age of Enlightenment coincided with the start of European tea and coffee drinking, the general uptick in the usage of stimulants instead of alcohol must have contributed to the intellectual flowering through to the Renaissance, at least for the literate classes.
So that's when one group of people stopped being drunk all the time.
That's the difference between a sufficient condition and a necessary condition. It's likely a combination of factors were required that might not have been available in other places. But there were something akin to renaissances in other places before Europe, but changing environments/factors limited their impact or spread, or even outright ended them.
I always find the argument "but why didn't this happen elsewhere" bizarre, when ... it usually has happened elsewhere. Ignorance isn't a great argument. Like, other places often had sewers and other sanitation long before Europe, which implies that alcohol could have been a limiting factor for Europe while not being a limiting factor elsewhere.
Also, industrialization saw the rise of the skilled workforce. People started earning more the more they could use their brain. It makes sense that they wouldn't want to numb it as much as they did before.
There was a switchboard with buttons for emergency breaks (e.g.toilet break). If you used it the machine stopped, a yellow light flashed and the foreman shouted at you.
I don't write this to complain, actually for me doing this for a couple of weeks during summer recess was quite fun. After this experience I also totally see how you just cannot do a job like that for 40+ years without alcohol.
At that factory drinking previously had been common among workers. They banned alcohol during weekdays after one worker fell into a spinning milling machine. But even after that those workers who came in on Saturdays were allowed to consume a limited quantity of beer.
Not neccessarily. The whole Luddite revolution/movement was trying to fight industrialization _because_ it required less skills, and reduced workers' wages. For example, before the automatic looms were introduced, cloth was produced by hand, by people of significant dexterity and skill. After automation, it was mainly produced by machines which needed only very basic (and low paid) human input here and there.
Pretty soon the demand (and pay) for skilled craftsmen rocketed back up because the newly affluent workers could now afford to buy more items and some of those were not yet mass-producable.
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In some physical jobs like the construction business, workers used to rely on alcohol to make through the work day until very recently. In some countries they might even still do so.
I can confirm from my own experience building a house and doing heavy lifting on the construction site, that after 10 hours of taxing work, an evening beer works wonders to relax your strained muscles and regain some feeling of comfort.
It's no surprise to me, that the reduction in alcohol consumption coincides with a switch from more hard physical labor, to more sitting jobs.
I think it's a bit like how I crave ice cold Coke when I'm thirsty on a hot summer day but then when I just drink tap water that craving reduces significantly. Therefore I know that my body really needed water but my brain translated in into a craving for Coke. There might be some similar learned behaviours between hard labourers and beer.
The catch is that without germ theory, people mostly did this process to water which was obviously contaminated. If water looked clean and tasted clean, why purify it? Even people who should know germ theory still make this mistake—people who go backpacking will take water from a clear stream and drink it, unaware that there is a beaver dam upstream and giardia in the water.
In many ways it filled (and still does, as does coffee) many of the same roles as alcohol. Certainly not the partying aspect, but as a beverage to have with food, relax or socialise with. Alcohol was consumed a lot more often in those more mundane contexts before.
Now my Fridays are filled with the same monotony as the rest of the work week.
I soon stopped drinking at lunch though, never do it anymore, never got much work done in the afternoon and made me a bit too aggressive..
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