“Researchers at Trinity College, Dublin, have recreated 16th-century everyday beer. It took them three years to recreate a brewery from that era and find the right ingredients to recreate a recipe they found in Dublin Castle, exactly after We succeeded. And the result was a brown-yellowish beer, without foam, that contained no less than five percent alcohol. A lot more than the two percent they assumed.”
It is no secret that in the Middle Ages more beer was drunk than water. “Water was not heated and cleaned in those days. That’s why it posed health risks. Beer was simply more hygienic. And because so much beer was drunk, historians all over Northern Europe assumed that beer contained less alcohol than the beer that was consumed. drinking nowadays.”
Strangely enough, there is very little scientific research that proves this assumption, the correspondent explains. “In the Netherlands and Belgium, surprisingly few recipes from that time have been copied to see whether that beer indeed contained as little alcohol as thought.”