• MartianSands@sh.itjust.works
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        7 days ago

        I don’t think sake could serve the role beer did, historically. Certainly in medieval Europe, they made what today would be considered a weak beer to drink for basic hydration. That was by far the easiest way for them to ensure the water was safe to drink.

        I’m pretty sure if you tried that with sake, you’d die

        • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works
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          7 days ago

          That was by far the easiest way for them to ensure the water was safe to drink.

          Actually, the alcohol in beer isn’t concentrated enough to kill off most microbes. Even yeast doesn’t die off until you start getting >13%, and there’s varieties of yeast that can tolerate twice that concentration.

          The reason why beer was safer to drink than water is because the brewing process requires it to be boiled. Beer was preferrable to boiled water due to taste and because it provided an extra source of calories

        • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
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          7 days ago

          Sake is basically the same thing as beer (grain(starch)-based alcohol), I don’t see a reason why it wouldn’t be possible to brew a weaker sake.

          But the thing is, they never really needed something to serve the role of beer (i.e. an alcoholic drink for safe hydration), because east asians figured out that boiling makes water safe quite a bit earlier that europeans (or they just drank boiled drinks despite not knowing that that’s one of the effects).

              • Pat_Riot@lemmy.today
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                7 days ago

                Beer has a pretty big caloric value. No citation provided as I’m quoting my memory of a thing i studied for a project 15 years ago. I could be totally full of shit.

                  • Pat_Riot@lemmy.today
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                    7 days ago

                    Bro, probably not, Jesus Christ man I said I was probably full of shit. What do you want from me? If you’re so interested in it all of a sudden then you go study it.