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 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).