What if Humans Never Discovered Alcohol?

Perhaps. But everyone else, with one or two exceptions, is completely ignoring the importance of alcohol as a preservative in pre-refridgeration days. Plus its importance in killing bacteria. Every time I get a shot, the area is wiped down before with an alcohol wipe. Those have now been butterflied away.

Aren't those wipes usually methanol not ethanol? Also they didn't start using those until fairly recently so by the time hygene is being used in medicine and if alcohol is discovered around then I'm doubting anyone would try drinking it, and considering that I'm fairly certain methanol is a better cleaner so they would die if they did.
 

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A fact that people are completely ignoring:
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Nobody Ignored that, as a matter of fact it has been stated several times in various ways.

Zoomar, i agree with your analisys. It's easy to assume a substance would take the place of another but it's really a pretty long logic jump.
 
As for transporting tea, I remember from Lands of Red and Gold discussions of various things the British used to substitute for tea, surely there's plenty of things you can use other than proper tea right? Hot drinks seem fairly universal.
 
A more likely timeline about alcohol would be for hops to never be used in beer, do they develop into a popular vegetable, get stewed in teas, or something else?
 
Perhaps. But everyone else, with one or two exceptions, is completely ignoring the importance of alcohol as a preservative in pre-refridgeration days. Plus its importance in killing bacteria. Every time I get a shot, the area is wiped down before with an alcohol wipe. Those have now been butterflied away.
Alcohol as it is found in fermented beverages like wine, beer, mead, etc. isn't a good preservative at all. It's not at a high enough concentration. In pre-refrigeration days, the best preservatives were salt, sugar, acetic acid, and dehydration. Ethanol solutions aren't an effective disinfectant unless they are around 60% ethanol or more, which is impossible to achieve before the invention of distillation, which didn't happen until the Middle Ages.
And even so, which would you prefer to drink, beer or water from the river into which your ox and sister have urinated?
Well, the water used to make the beer is the same water that your ox and sister have urinated in :D
Aren't those wipes usually methanol not ethanol? Also they didn't start using those until fairly recently so by the time hygene is being used in medicine and if alcohol is discovered around then I'm doubting anyone would try drinking it, and considering that I'm fairly certain methanol is a better cleaner so they would die if they did.
They are either ethanol or isopropanol. Methanol wipes would be toxic, and I doubt it's very much better than ethanol at cleaning.
A more likely timeline about alcohol would be for hops to never be used in beer, do they develop into a popular vegetable, get stewed in teas, or something else?
Hops already are used as a vegetable. Only the young shoots are eaten though. They were used as medicine before their addition to beer, and still are. Hops are only a very recent footnote in the long history of beer. Many other herbs were used before hops gained popularity.
 
The main advantage Beer had was not that the alcohol was a disinfectant, but that because you needed to boil the water during the manufacturing process the germs in the water were killed off by the high heat.
 
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