Beer : Health and Nutrition

38 Chapter Two
had a calori c value of around 150–200 kilocalories per pint, so 3 pints per day for a
small boy will have yielded some 20–25% of his energy needs. And furthermore it will
have ‘supplied a modest amount of calcium and appreciable quantities of ribo avin,
nicotinic acid, pyridoxine, pantothenic acid and perhaps other vitamins’ (Drummond
& Wilbraham 1958).
This is not to ignore that the wholemeal bread still favoured in those days will also
have supplied vitamins, including thiamine, which tends to be diminished in beer as it
is readily consumed by yeast during fermentation.
It is certain, however, that home-brewed beer was a good, sound, healthful drink
and one which could not possibly do any harm to children when drunk in reasonable
amounts.
Drummond & Wilbraham (1958)
Moderation, however, was not universally displayed. And so the rst laws were already
in place to reduce drunkenness, including xed hours when pubs must close at night, no
opening on Sundays and a limit on any drinker of one hour at a time (King 1947).
In the early eighteenth century gin was developing popularity, and no licence was
needed for its production, unlike beer. The duty on gin was merely tuppence per gallon
(Drummond & Wilbraham 1958). By 1735 there were 5 million gin distilleries in England
(King 1947). By 1750 it seems that every fourth or fth house in the slum areas of
London sold gin, or something that passed for gin (Drummond & Wilbraham 1958).
There were signs above doors claiming that ‘here a man may get drunk for a penny, and
dead drunk for tuppence’ (Fleming 1975). Hogarth’s paintings capture the sentiments: in
Beer Street people seemed jolly and healthy, whereas in Gin Street they were debauched
(Fig. 2.1). One London clergyman, James Townley, was driven to write:
Gin, cursed end, with fury fraught
Makes human race a prey;
It enters by a deadly draught, And steals our life away.
Virtue and Truth, driven to despair,
Its rage compels to y;
But cherishes, with hellish care,
Theft, murder, perjury.
Damned cup, that on the vitals preys,
That liquid re contains;
Which madness to the heart conveys,
And rolls it through the veins.
Roueche (1960)