Boiling water. . .and maybe having a beer. A Hundred Years Ago: Drink Pure, Safe Water: Hundred-Year-Old Advice

This is a topic that we still hear about, but frankly it doesn't mean what it used to in almost every place in the developed world:

Drink Pure, Safe Water: Hundred-Year-Old Advice

Boil your water?  I'll bet  you don't.

Why would you have?

See that item about cholera?  That's why.

Oh, you're thinking. . .that was the 19th Century, not the 20th.

Well. . . .

See that item about the baby in 1919?

This sort of thing, by the way, is why humans brewed beer, in part, and fermented wine, in part.

Now, that's only part of the reason, to be sure, there are others.

But it was part.

Now, if you read the blogs and whatnot you'll see this notion challenged.  "Oh no, that isn't why people brewed beer".

Well, bull.

The modern challenge to this notion is based on a misunderstanding of prior conditions.  Alcohol won't make that water safe, the critics sneer. And they're right.

But, if you consider that water, even not all that long ago, was drawn from a pond where things lived and where cows came up and peed and the like, you'll have to appreciate that it was, well, dirty. 

And brewers and vintners, even if they didn't have degrees in sanitary design, did grasp that dirty water makes a bad product. So they did what the could to clean it.

And then they boiled the water.

And that did achieve something, whether it was intended to, or not.

Of course, in the U.S., in 1918, the government was about to make that illegal.