Episode 31: Why did people drink so much beer in the middle ages?

A few books and articles I read for this one.

The main two were standard books on the history of beer and ale: 

Ian Hornsey, 2003, A History of Beer and Brewing. RSC 

Richard Unger, 2004, Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Then a few articles and books on specific aspects:

Charles Bamforth, 2004, Beer: Health and Nutrition. Blackwell had a lot on beer as a health food in the middle ages, and defences of beer. 

Franz Meussdoerffer, 2009, A Comprehensive History of Beer Brewing, in Handbook of Brewing: Processes, Technology, Markets, ed. HM Ersslinger.

Eline Poelmans and Johan Swinnen, A Brief Economic History of Beer in The Economics of Beer, ed. JFM Swinnen. 

This is Tofi Kerthjalfadsson's 1998 experiments in making authentic medieval beer while trying to to give himeself lead poisoning (wimp).  https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pwp/tofi/medieval_english_ale.html