On Sun, 15 Jun 2003, Phosphor wrote:

> Any europeans who didn't tolerate too much alcohol were well and truly
> weeded out between old rome and new london. water was too risky in many
> areas due to contamination.  beer and cider much safer.  the daily allowance
> for monks and soldiers in  Stuart England was one gallon of hard ale [4.5
> litres].

You're not saying they drank alcohol in place of water right?

Alcohol is a diuretic (i.e. the more you drink the more water you're going
to want to drink). If you were stranded on a desert isle, with no water
and a 24 back of budweiser...you'd well die of thirst. Unless of course
you could find some ingenious way of extracting the water from the beer.

Craig