How Did Tudors Survive Without Coffee? (The Answer Is Weirder Than You Think)

You've probably heard that Tudor people never drank water, that ale was the default drink for everyone including children, because the water would kill you. It's in pretty much every Tudor history book from the last thirty years. And it turns out it's a lot more complicated than that. In this episode we dig into where the "nobody drank water" story actually comes from, why the sources historians rely on have a serious bias problem, and what a remarkable piece of recent research from Trinity College Dublin found when they actually reconstructed Tudor beer from 16th century records. And then coffee arrives in England around 1650, and everything changes. Link to the two-sleeps video is here: TudorFair.com for the mug! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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How Did Tudors Survive Without Coffee? (The Answer Is Weirder Than You Think) is an episode from Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the Tudors by Heather Teysko.

This episode is 27:18 long.

This episode was published on Apr 27, 2026.

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