Just curious.......

How do you suppose that people way back in the day kept their equipment sanitized? People like that founding fathers or even before that..... I doubt they could hop on their horse and pick up some starsan at the LHBS... This may be a stupid topic but I am just kinda curious. Any ideas???

My serious answer is: Do we even know what beer tasted like at that point?? Yes it got people drunk and there were different flavors. But do we know that a smoked porter (the average taste of one) tasted the same as it does now? My geuss is not, because they probably had off flavors due to lack of sanitization.

I am not a beer historian and by far am not an expert, this is just my thinking, I have been wrong before. Let me know what ya think!

The only other answer I have is: they just didnt care! ha

HAHA... Yeah I guess that is a possibility. They just didnt know any better, or they didnt really care if it was bad if it got them hammered... HAHA!!!

Was it Louis Pasteaur (sp) that advanced the idea of bacteria spoiling foods?

I don't think they had any notion of sanitary procedures back then, and the beer fermented naturally with wild yeast, IIRC.

At that point in time they were not aware of yeast and its affects. So essentially they would be fermented by wild yeast, due to not sanitizing; or left over yeast from reusing and not sanitizing. I dont think they were able to create a beer with any consistency at all. That's my theory, and I'm sticking to it.

I suspect they could not reproduce it with such consistency as is done today. Nonetheless I think a lot of different styles are a product of the yeast that grew in that area and the type of ingredients that were available. Hops also discourage bacteria growth, which they didn't always know but it worked to their advantage.

I remember reading somewhere about how they had big sticks they used to stir the wort and they thought this stick had some kind of special powers but what happened was yeast cultures lived in the stick and went off into the wort and eventually fermented it.

Whichever way you look at it, without the sort of sanitation we can get today, people in the olden days must have drunk a lot of sucky beers.