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2019-03-12, 06:44 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Drink omly beer for 46 days, no food?
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2019-03-12, 06:57 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Drink omly beer for 46 days, no food?
That's another problem, wine is full of microbes. I don't really know how much alcohol is needed to kill them (and how it would relate to Greek wine with and without water), but it's interesting to point out that pasteurisation was invented for wine. Napoleon III asked Pasteur to look into why French wine was getting too acid (and a number of other problems), and, over a few years, Pasteur found out the bacteria and fungi that caused the various unwanted alterations. He then conceived and patented his pasteurisation method.
Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955
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2019-03-12, 07:12 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Drink omly beer for 46 days, no food?
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2019-03-12, 08:00 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Birmingham, AL
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2019-03-12, 08:03 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Drink omly beer for 46 days, no food?
It's pretty much all the Victorians. They came up with so many moronic concepts about the past its a wonder we know anything of the periods before it. Some dumb ideas came earlier, but the majority were Victorians.
As for the original question. If he's drinking older style beer, like the heavy thick kind, he should be ok with some added in water. If its modern beer... well its gonna suck.
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2019-03-12, 09:38 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Drink omly beer for 46 days, no food?
Other way around Ancient Greek Wine was apparently really alcoholic, and watering it down was an important part of making the stuff drinkable. I've seen some sources that suggest that aside from that, the warm climate could likely lead to enough evaporation to affect the viscosity, and I doubt alcholic syrup makes for especially good drinking unless you're specifically trying to get inebriated.
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2019-03-12, 11:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Drink only beer for 46 days, no food?
How effective alcohol, like other types of disinfectants, are at killing things depends on concentration and time. Something with 70% alcohol will kill things much faster than 5%, but if you've got it sitting for months at a time it is going to kill anything that can't survive the alcohol eventually. Not everything is equally resistant to alcohol either, which is why many different types of microbes are used to create different alcohols and generally the strength of the alcohol is determined by the point at which the alcohol content kills of the bacteria that make it.
Some types of things that can harm us are killed very easily by chlorine, but there are other things that chlorine doesn't really do well for so we now use ozone and/or UV to kill those microbes instead. I don't know how alcohol compares to other disinfectants, because no one treats water with alcohol on a commercial level at this point, but there is probably charts out there if you cared to look.
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2019-03-13, 04:04 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Drink only beer for 46 days, no food?
I mean, the Romans apparently did intestinal surgery by washing the exposed viscera in warm wine and then stitching everything up, and enough patients survived that they wrote about it. So, there has to be some effect.
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2019-03-13, 05:36 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Drink only beer for 46 days, no food?
Greek wine is generally shown being mixed with water directly before the banquet starts. However, I can't tell with certainty if this is just a way to amplify the depiction of the feasting, and it's also generally done by rich people or for very large gatherings; so I don't know how long a humble labourer would have needed to finish his wine mixed with water. I also don't know how well it would have kept if mixed with water and left there for a week or two.
BTW, I earlier said that Ulysses's companions drank pure wine, but it's actually a mistake. The translation I was reading added a word that means "pure" or, less literally, "good", which isn't in the original text. Interestingly enough, Homer there uses a word for wine (methu) that is related to mead.Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955
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2019-03-13, 08:52 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2007
Re: Drink omly beer for 46 days, no food?
As noted later in the thread, the guy drinking beer for Lent is drinking doppelbock, a beer specifically designed as "liquid bread" for monks attempting this stunt (or more likely some lighter sentence or simply they liked it for other drinking). If he tried this stunt with either small or regular beer, he'd be in real trouble.
Anyone know if this was really true and how the Greeks made such alcoholic wine? Until Pasteur discovered that yeast was the key to making alcohol, medieval beer brewing used a "lucky stick" in hopes of getting the right yeast. I'd be surprised if the Greeks had any better control over their yeast. I'd be fairly surprised if ancient wine could get much stronger than the modern stuff (even if the wine had a far greater carbohydrate content, I still wouldn't expect random yeast to survive a high alcohol content). Perhaps this is part of the "ancients didn't drink water at all" and that the diluted wine was needed to satisfy water requirements (and you could easily find clean water in "barbaric" lands).
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2019-03-13, 09:25 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Drink only beer for 46 days, no food?
Last edited by Peelee; 2019-03-13 at 09:25 AM.
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2019-03-13, 11:52 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Drink only beer for 46 days, no food?
I'm not sure of that. We have enough people that have survived falling from a plane (without a parachute, while it was at cruising altitude) that we have written about it, and yet that doesn't give us any insight into why they survived while most do not, nor is it in any way a reliable science.
I mean, it is still better odds for the average roman citizen than the cesarean section, but I suspect blind chance alone made them survive the shock of the procedure and the sepsis of post surgery.
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2019-03-13, 12:19 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Indianapolis
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2019-03-13, 12:51 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Drink only beer for 46 days, no food?
Last edited by Peelee; 2019-03-13 at 12:51 PM.
Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
Number of times Roland St. Jude has sworn revenge upon me: 2
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2019-03-13, 01:21 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2013
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Re: Drink omly beer for 46 days, no food?
This is mostly highly improbable. Modern wine is at about the limit of the strength that can be achieved with fermentation. Port, sherry, and the like are fortified with distilled alcoholic products. The boiling point of alcohol is 60 degrees Celcius, whereas water's is 100 degrees Celcius, so while water may evaporate from fluids, alcohol will evaporate from the same fluid faster. If a fluid containing both is left exposed to air, it will have less alcoholic content as a percentage as time passes.
There are two means of fractioning water out of fluids that I know of, one is distillation, the other is freezing, ice is more or less pure water, so removing ice from a fluid can increase its alcohol percentage (no alcohol is gained in this process, water is lost).Last edited by halfeye; 2019-03-13 at 01:31 PM.
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2019-03-13, 01:44 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Drink omly beer for 46 days, no food?
Actually I got interested in the subject and it turns out that the distillation process was well known in the ancient times. I have no idea yet, if it was widely used for alcohol production though. I kind of doubt that in case of greek wine, since there would be no point to it, if they watered it down afterwards anyway.
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2019-03-13, 02:00 PM (ISO 8601)
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2019-03-13, 02:07 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Drink omly beer for 46 days, no food?
Makes it more portable and less likely to go bad, same reasons food has historically been and still is dehydrated today - the higher alcohol content of distilled wine is going to make it more stable because it dramatically reduces the amount of things that could live in it to spoil it, and taking out a significant amount of the water content makes it a lot lighter and easier to transport. Making it more potent would be something of a happy side effect in that case when that was desired - the hypothetical intent would be to create a sort of wine concentrate that the end consumer would redilute/rehydrate back to the original potency and volume.
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2019-03-13, 03:47 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2013
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Re: Drink omly beer for 46 days, no food?
The end of what Son? The story? There is no end. There's just the point where the storytellers stop talking.
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2019-03-13, 04:02 PM (ISO 8601)
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2019-03-13, 04:37 PM (ISO 8601)
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2019-03-13, 05:46 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2013
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- Bristol, UK
Re: Drink omly beer for 46 days, no food?
The end of what Son? The story? There is no end. There's just the point where the storytellers stop talking.
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2019-03-13, 05:52 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Drink only beer for 46 days, no food?
The Greeks did mix different kinds of wine (especially different acidities). If they made spirits, I guess they could have added those, too. The Romans also put a serious lot of stuff in their wine. Things we really wouldn't. But I don't know of any single spirit made in Rome or Greece in those times. There was a Scythian drink made with honey, water and herbs that was called melogion (melli = honey) and was deemed stronger than wine, but I really wonder what those herbs were.
And the Greeks also made straw wine, and you don't need to add alcohol to have 17% this way. Educated guesses I have seen for Greek wine were around 16-18%.
I also am somewhat surprised looking at these numbers. I can only assume that the Greeks really, really, really didn't want to get drunk. There's a line from a comedian that said that safe drinking only lasted until the third cup, and a Greek kylix cup usually held about 1/4 litre (of course, there was a lot of variation). I don't know how much a later kantharos cup held.
EDIT: Classical Greeks put perfume in wine. And alembics were used to prepare perfume on Cypros around 1800 BC. They could have fortified wine with alcoholic perfumes. I don't know if that was still how perfumes were made around 500-400 BC.Last edited by Vinyadan; 2019-03-13 at 06:01 PM.
Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955
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2019-03-13, 06:13 PM (ISO 8601)
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2019-03-13, 07:13 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Drink omly beer for 46 days, no food?
Except that the story implies that the Greeks never drank plain undiluted wine (how barbaric!). The typical justification is that their wine was to potent, but that seems extremely unlikely (unless they had some lost easy way to make spirits).
Galen (the guy credited with "all knowledge of medicine" (especially remembered for the humors) in the medieval era, although I sure plenty of that was from later commentaries as well) was a surgeon for gladiators and probably had to deal with that a lot. Anything that allowed you to survive exposed gut wounds was worth writing up.
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2019-03-13, 11:22 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Drink omly beer for 46 days, no food?
Once they got the process going it would be easy to keep is going. The "right" bacteria would stay in the containers and then when the next batch was started they could start reproducing much more quickly than any foreign bacteria because there were already many of the right kind in the wood.
There was a show, or research, that I saw that talked about it. I think the FDA was trying to tell some company (forget what they were making, it may have been beer but I think it was something else... I can't remember the details) that they had to switch all of their equipment over to stainless steel instead of wood because it could be sterilized much easier. So they did an experiment, with the "seasoned" wooden equipment and the sterilized stainless steel, started their product and then purposefully introduced... I think E.Coli, and went through the whole process and then tested the end result of both. The stainless steel had orders of magnitude more contaminant in it than the wooden one because the "good" bacteria out competed it by a large amount. I don't think it was completely safe, but it was much better off than the completely sterilized stainless steel batch.
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2019-03-14, 04:06 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2016
Re: Drink only beer for 46 days, no food?
I recall reading somewhere that a certain enzyme exists in some populations that helps break down alcohol, lessening it's influence.
Maybe the ancient greeks just lacked it? Should be possible to check out for someone with the right education and access to a DNA database.-
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2019-03-15, 07:18 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Drink only beer for 46 days, no food?
Heard a news story on this earlier. He's drinking 3 to 5 beers a day and has lost about 16 pounds already by day 6. I get the impression that this guy did not do a lot of research on his "beer diet".
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2019-03-15, 07:37 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Drink only beer for 46 days, no food?
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2019-03-15, 07:42 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Drink only beer for 46 days, no food?
16 pounds in a week seems extremely high. Like, unbelievably so.
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