Today’s college students might have to smuggle beer into their dorm rooms, but a frosty mug was far from forbidden for the early students at the College of William and Mary. Recent archaeology has unearthed a mysterious feature, and evidence suggests that it’s the school’s early brewhouse.
Archaeologist Andy Edwards explains, “Beer was just, it was food at the time. Beer was probably safer in some ways than drinking water for two reasons. One thing, you had to boil the water to make the beer and that killed significant bacteria. And, in the brewing process itself, the fermenting process kills bacteria as well. So it was the safer thing to drink, and it was nutritious.”
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