This is gonna be the thread where we talk about stuff

In times gone by people often drank beer and beeresque liquids more often than they did water, because clean water wasn't so easy to come by
Language was invented in the past, not the present!

This sounds apocryphal
reference please
also beeresque is my favorite word this week

This is something everyone in England is taught as part of their history class in primary and secondary school and I can find a fair few websites documenting the fact that people in the past had terrible diets (what a surprise) but none with strong citations. I guess they don't expect secondary school children to be interested in citations? It's pretty vexing.
Daily alcohol consumption was virtually universal in the Tudor era. I mean it's slightly obvious if you think about it, clean water would have been much harder to come by what with the lack of plumbing. By the Tudor period people had figured out that it was probably a good idea to stop drinking dirty water, but not quite what to do about making it fit for drinking again (it turns out just boiling it works but if you told someone that before they discovered germs they'd call you mad).
Milk and fruit juices and the fermented, alcoholic variety are more convenient and readily available than your village well. Alcohol was often diluted down to just 2-4% but it was still present with most meals.
This is also presumably why alcohol is so deeply ingrained in our society, it's just been around forever and there hasn't even been a taboo on it until relatively recently.

It's easy to look back now and think "but that's so stupid! Why would you drink beer all the time?", but that was just the cultural norm back then. People just didn't know how things worked.
I'm sure hundreds of years in the future people will look back on us in horror at how we could so casually line our walls with electrical cables, as if we were unaware of the irreversible brain damage this was causing, or something along those lines.

I've not been able to provide any links which really annoys me, I can barely find anything that says anything at all about what people drank and isn't written for 14 year olds with no citations, or (even more annoying) people asking this exact same question and receiving the answers I'm giving... but without the answerer giving any citations. So feel free not to believe me. This is just what I have been taught.

Even Wikipedia only has this to say:

Beer was one of the most common drinks during the Middle Ages. It was consumed daily by all social classes in the northern and eastern parts of Europe where grape cultivation was difficult or impossible.[citation needed] Though wine of varying qualities was the most common drink in the south, beer was still popular among the lower classes. Since the purity of water could seldom be guaranteed, alcoholic drinks were a popular choice, having been boiled as part of the brewing process. Beer also provided a considerable amount of the daily calories in the northern regions. In England and the Low Countries, the per capita consumption was 275–300 liters (60–66 gallons) a year by the Late Middle Ages, and beer was drunk with every meal.[citation needed]