Beer : Health and Nutrition

Beer Through History 37
Houses for the sale of beer had rst become licensed in the reign of the boy king, Edward
VI, in the mid-sixteenth century (Savage 1866).
By an Act of 1604, it was decreed that parish constables should inspect alehouses to
ensure that they were operated properly (King 1947). It was emphasised that:
the ancient, true and principal use of such places was for the relief of wayfaring
men and women and also to ful l the requirements of those people unable to
store victuals in large quantities and not for the entertainment of lewd and idle
people.
No workman was allowed to spend longer than one hour in an inn unless his occupation
or residence obliged him so to do. Fines of 10 shillings were collected by churchwardens
and given to the poor of the parish. At the time the cost of best ale was xed at a
penny a quart (one quart = two pints) and small beer at a halfpenny. Notwithstanding,
the government in the middle of the seventeenth century was raising some 40% of its
budget by taxing beer (Wilson 1991).
Beer: a nutritious dish for the whole family
By the late seventeenth century more than 12 million barrels of beer were drunk each
year in Great Britain, when the population was only some 5 million. That’s just about 2
pints per day per person. Even infants, who drank small beer, scarcely ever drank water.
Although naturally there was no explanation for why it was the case, it was universally
recognised that it was safer to drink beer. The boiling and the hopping were inadvertently
water puri cation techniques.
In the era of Charles II, a family of seven in London would drink a barrel of small
beer per week, this despite a tax of six pence a barrel (two shillings and sixpence for
strong beer) (Savage 1866).
Tea seems rst to have arrived in Holland and Portugal in about 1610 and in Germany
in the 1630s, but the rst public sale of tea in England was not until 1657 (Tannahill
1973). The rst coffeehouse in England was to be found in Oxford in 1650. Soon there
were choices available for a wholesome beverage at mealtimes and it no longer needed
to be alcoholic. The progressive growth in tea drinking led to brewers brewing weaker
beer (small beer was now 2–3% alcohol, compared to the previous 4–5%) and having
to keep lower prices (Drummond & Wilbraham 1958). Beer, though, retained a key
place in the diet, and at the end of the seventeenth century the beer allowance at Christ’s
Hospital school was 30 barrels per week for 407 people (Drummond & Wilbraham
1958). These authors stress the nutritive value of the beer (additional to its safety
dimension when compared to water to drink). They estimate that small beer will have