Not trying to be argumentative or any such...
Mostly just checking an assumption against folk who know more on the subject.
Wasn’t beer, for example, considered a food item in ancient Egypt? I had gotten the idea, somewhere, from something... cant remember exactly. But that idea was that beer of the age this thread refers to was lesser in alcohol and not purified so had more food nutrient in it and was used as a meal item. Same with the wine and other fermented beverages.
Only the very rich drank for pleasure with filtered beers and wines for party reasons. For everyone else it was unfiltered stuff and was produced because of difficulties in long term storage of produce prone to rot and the difficulties in distributing large quantities of baked goods before they became too stale or molded for consumption.
Is that completely off?
Beer has always been considered “liquid bread” since the beginning. The main ingredients; water, grain, and yeast are the building blocks of any advanced society and its local variant of bread.
Furthermore, that the alcohol content pretty much guaranteed that it contained few if any harmful bacteria when water supplies of the day were a stew of them was a happy side benefit.
Cheers,
knewshound