Drinks in Skyrim

[KitKat]

So, I have iNeeds mod installed. Food, drinks, sleep and all the good stuff. And actually I have NO problems with surviving(waterskins are ok), neither do I have questions about the mod itself.

More about... The immersion of Skyrim itself. All the drinks I see on the tables in any house/cave/castle/ruins/etc are alcohol - mead, wine, ale and so on. There are NO water bottles or any other non-alcohol drinks. Like... waaaaaaaaaat? Everyone's always drunk? I mean, surely, alcohol helps with cold weather(Frostfall mod) and all, but drinking alcohol all the time is kinda bad for health, ya know :D

[gnewna]

Well, in real life olden times, water was generally... iffy at best, unless you had access to a good, clean well, so most people in towns drank (fairly weak) booze most of the time, as the booze part kinda acts as a preservative, at least in comparison to plain water. So, it might be that.

Or it might be that Nords are a rowdy bunch who frown at drinking sensible things like milk.

I think Hearthfire adds jugs of milk, but they're very uncommon in an unmodded game. There are a few mods for Oldrim that add non-alcoholic drinks (Drinks for the Thirsty, Be A Milk-Drinker, Varietea, to name a few) but AFAIK they're not (yet) ported to SSE :(

(Be a Milk-Drinker puts bottles of milk in certain Nords' homes for added amusement value, I think.)

[gnewna]

Oh, hooray, it looks like Be A Milk-Drinker has been ported, I swear I looked for it like last night: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/5323/? (Link is for a patch to make BAMD compatible with USSEP, as the mod page says, it requires the original mod, and links to it.)

[KitKat]

Well, the wells are quite common in towns/cities/near lone houses and farms even. So why no bottles or jugs of water..? Kinda immersion breaking that the only thing everyone drinks is aclohol... Because with iNeeds mod, when you are drunk, you get blurry vision(duh!) and there's a high chance of falling on the floor like if you're paralized/knocked out when you move. :D

[Docsprock]

Sort of like medeival England. Virtually nobody drank water. Ale, beer, mead, wine, milk was about all that was safe. All the water was tainted with sewage. The only safe way to consume water was by converting it to the previously mentioned forms.

Read a little history and see for yourself.

Now Skyrim has clean water. The snowmelt rushing streams are pretty much guaranteed to be clean. However, most of medeival Europe had no access to such water. High in the Alps, Carpathians, Appenines, Pyrenees were about it.

[Incunabulum]

Originally posted by Tiny Tina:

So, I have iNeeds mod installed. Food, drinks, sleep and all the good stuff. And actually I have NO problems with surviving(waterskins are ok), neither do I have questions about the mod itself.

More about... The immersion of Skyrim itself. All the drinks I see on the tables in any house/cave/castle/ruins/etc are alcohol - mead, wine, ale and so on. There are NO water bottles or any other non-alcohol drinks. Like... waaaaaaaaaat? Everyone's always drunk? I mean, surely, alcohol helps with cold weather(Frostfall mod) and all, but drinking alcohol all the time is kinda bad for health, ya know :D

That's actually pretty normal for the tech level. These people do not have access to *clean* water sources. Nor do they know about boiling. Lightly alcoholic drinks is actually the norm here as they are safer than water in general.

[Belanos]

Originally posted by Tiny Tina:

Well, the wells are quite common in towns/cities/near lone houses and farms even. So why no bottles or jugs of water..?

Because the mod author didn't want to go through that much trouble for something that is only a minor detail? It would have taken a massive amount of work to manually place bottles of water in the way that you're suggesting, and for what purpose? If you don't like the way the author has implemented his ideas, then don't use the mod.

[nonames]

Use the mod you hunger along with ineed it won't solve the alcohol problem but you will enjoy ineed a lot more as food becomes quite hard to find sometimes when using it with the mod you hunger.

[hawkeye]

Milk wasn't safe because it wasn't pasteurized (which isn't pasture - ized).

When there is no telly and you can't read, alcohol helps pass the time.

But there is a mod that adds drinking fountains from which you can drink.

[gnewna]

Fresh milk would be fairly safe, you just couldn't store it long, hence making cheese and butter and so on.

[Belanos]

Originally posted by gnewna:

Fresh milk would be fairly safe, you just couldn't store it long, hence making cheese and butter and so on.

That's simply not true:

https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/rawmilk/raw-milk-questions-and-answers.html

[gnewna]

Sure, but I think most of the people who bang on about raw milk nowadays expect to be able to keep it for a comparable amount of time as pasteurised. I'm talking about properly fresh milk, i.e. more or less still warm from your own cow. People obviously drank milk before pasteurisation, yes?

Of course, there's only a handful of people in Skyrim who have a cow, so the vast majority wouldn't have access to genuinely fresh milk.

(Mind you, I bet there's probably spells to kill diseases in milk/drinking water, why wouldn't there be? It's not medieval earth, and tbh for all we know bacteria and viruses don't work the same way, e.g. you can catch vampire germs from a vampire's weapon, you can cure any disease by grabbing a shrine or eating the right sort of feather...)

[Belanos]

Originally posted by gnewna:

Sure, but I think most of the people who bang on about raw milk nowadays expect to be able to keep it for a comparable amount of time as pasteurised. I'm talking about properly fresh milk, i.e. more or less still warm from your own cow.

There are plenty of diseases that can be passed from animals to humans. Swine Flu is one example. Drinking milk straight from the cow is no guarantee of safety, as that article I linked to indicates.

People obviously drank milk before pasteurisation, yes?

Sure, and they used to die a lot more than we do today as well. Life expectancy is probably double what it was in the time before pasteurization. Granted that wasn't all because of drinking raw milk, but that practise was certainly a factor.