Adapted from an earlier thread:

In the British navy it was the practice to embark beer or other alcoholic beverages as part of the sailors' daily ration. The "rum ration" as a defined amount per day can't be dated until 1844, but sailors certainly had access to spirits throughout the working day. During the period of the Napoleonic wars, which I am most familiar with, sailors would be issued a gallon of beer per day, but the beer ration became an enormous brewing/stowage problem over time. A third-rate ship, the smallest ship reckoned able to stand in the line of battle, would have to stow 50-100 tuns (~240-250 gallon units) of beer, which would come in large barrels called "butts" (half a tun) which themselves weighed half a ton (the weight measure) each. The volume and weight of those displaced other stores, so rum gradually replaced beer, especially for foreign service.

The spirits ration was half a pint (instead of a gallon of beer) and it became regularly issued in the morning and evening, mixed as "three-water" grog (three parts of water to one of spirits). Two pints of liquid would not be nearly enough for a working day, so we infer that sailors drank water in the intervening time. (There was also absolutely an illicit trade in spirits, but that's a separate issue.) The spirits ration could be stopped for small crimes, but spirits (or beer) were seen as an entitlement and stopping spirits or watering them were causes for discontent among sailors.

Moving to fresh water, then: water stored in wooden casks would certainly become slimy and unpalatable over time. Ships dealt with this by frequently re-watering (at streams or other fresh water sources), collecting rainwater, and by boiling water, but many sailors had to just tough it out (for lack of a better term). Iron water storage tanks mitigated those problems, but they were not in wide use until the end of the period I'm familiar with.

Much of a ship's fresh water would in any case be used for soaking salt meat (beef and pork) and cooking, not drinking. But free access to a barrel of water ("scuttle butt") is mentioned in a fair number of contemporary sources.

Beer was generally brewed and cattle were slaughtered in winter months, which affected the manning of a fleet (to sail in the summer, the ships and men necessary would have to be "established" the previous autumn, so that brewing/slaughtering could take place during the winter).

There were continual complaints about the quality of beer during the 16th and 17th centuries; in July 1653 an admiral complained "the greatest part of the beer we had before, and is now come along with the Reserve, is not fit for men to drink for aught we hear as yet, having continual complaints thereof. The captain of the Reserve informs us that his men choose rather to drink water than beer." That would have been for beer brewed the previous winter, so that gives us a timeline of < 6 months for it to go bad. During that same time period (of the Dutch wars), the admiralty did not realize that its contract for "sea beer" did not cover "strong beer," which was said to last longer. I haven't found specific anecdotes other than that which would date the time that beer would last.

After the Dutch wars and the chaos of the late 17th century, the victualing establishment got better and more routinized. Standing naval budgets meant that more planning could go into brewing/slaughtering/baking and the other victualing requirements, although complaints about the quality and quantity of beer (and other victuals) were often the cause of small mutinies.

The switch from beer to rum was not made official until the 19th century -- the beer ration was on the books until 1833, and the rum ration dates only to 1844 -- although I would point out that what was on the admiralty's books often lagged what the actual use in practice was. It seems from the books I've found that a "switch" or at least substitution of other spirits for beer was not uncommon when fleets started venturing into the Americas (where rum was common) or the Mediterranean (where sailors would drink wine).

In the late 17th century, British ships sailing to the West Indies would stop at Madeira to buy wine, which Rodger describes as "the usual tropical substitute for beer." The voyages he's describing would have taken place in the period roughly 1688-1700ish.

It's also worth pointing out that officers and captains kept many types of alcohol on the mess table. In the 1670s, Edward Teonge, a parson, went to sea to escape his creditors. He mentioned several visits to the captains' table, including this one:

This day our noble captain feasted the officers of his small squadron with four dishes of meat, viz. four excellent hens and a piece of pork boiled in a dish; a gigot of excellent mutton and turnips; a piece of beef of eight ribs, well seasoned and roasted; and a couple of very fat green geese; last of all, a great Cheshire cheese: a rare feast at shore. His liquors were answerable, viz. Canary, sherry, Rhenish, claret, white wine, cider, ale, beer, all of the best sort; and punch like ditchwater; with which we conclude the day and week in drinking to the king and all that we love; while the wind blows fair."

Quite a party, indeed.

Sources:

• Gardiner and Atkinson, First Dutch War vol. 5

• N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean

• The Social History of English Seamen, 1485-1649 (ed. Cheryl A. Fury)

To focus only on the Romans (as I tend to do), the answer is straightforward: they (typically) drank in moderation, and watered down their wine.

The usual estimate is that adult Romans consumed about a liter (that is, rough a quart) of wine every day. Since this equates to about 1 1/3 modern bottles of wine, you might assume that they constantly tipsy. By and large, however, they were not.

First, that liter was consumed over the course of the entire day, and unless you happened to be attending a particularly debauched convivium (as the Romans sometimes called banquets that involved a great deal of wine), you wouldn't drink all that much at a sitting. The poet Horace suggested that a pint (about two-thirds of a modern bottle) was more than sufficient for a pleasant dinner (Sat. 1.1.74).

Second, the Romans (like the Greeks) almost always watered down their wine. Most ancient wines probably had an alcohol content around 15% (the Romans harvested grapes when they were ripe and full of sugar, and allowed fermentation to reach its natural conclusion – that is, to continue until all the sugars were consumed or alcohol killed the yeast). It was, however, considered barbaric, or at least very bad taste, to drink wine neat. Authorities disagreed about the ideal proportion. In most cases, however, the wine consumed at social gatherings was probably between two-thirds and three-fourths water, which would have reduced the alcoholic content to about that of modern beer.

There were, of course, exceptions to the rule of moderation, which our sources love to dwell on. The emperor Tiberius, for example, was greatly impressed by the potatious prowess of a man from Milan known as "Tricongius" (three gallon guy) because he could...drink three gallons of wine in a single draft. Even more impressively (according to Pliny the Elder) Tricongius never got drunk (HN 14.145). Likewise, the emperor Aurelian is said to have had a jester who would drink an entire cask of wine through the ancient equivalent of a beer bong for the edification of the imperial court (SHA, Aur. 50.4). The most telling signs of indulgence, however, are the many hangover remedies mentioned in our sources.

The fact that our sources mention such excess with such regularity and such disapproval, however, reinforces the fact that rampant consumption was rare, and moderation the rule.

I talk more about classical wine consumption in this video about Greco-Roman drinking games.

Caveat: Most of this relates to nineteenth century Britain.

Great question!

I don't know if you've got access to JSTOR or OpenAthens, but there's been a hell of a lot published recently on the social history of alcohol consumption throughout the Victorian era. Availability is key. A lot of it is to do with licensing reform, and the willingness of town and borough authorities in the UK to allow the proliferation of licensed premises, especially along dockside thoroughfares in maritime communities. Louise Moon wrote a brilliant PhD thesis in 2015 on Portsmouth's own 'sailortown' called Sailortowns and Sailors in the Port of Portsmouth which contains a lot of info on how people interacted with alcohol and what this meant for society. In Wales, premises were under strict orders to stop furnishing patrons with drinks after a certain time in the evening (which varied from borough to borough), but in my own town of Swansea - an important centre of maritime commerce in Victorian Britain - there were very few summary prosecutions of landlords who broke the rules. Pubs and inns were important public spaces that were largely self-regulating and provided a relatively safe environment for the working classes to forget about the drudgery of industrial working life. Yes, the industrial revolution emancipated the lower orders from subsistence living, but it also gave them disposable income and spare time in which to spend it. Hooch was unsophisticated and it's chemical make-up was largely unregulated beyond the inspection of weights and measures (usually carried out by the local Police Detective).

In Britain at least, governmental studies on working class behaviour are riddled with errors of compilation and bias. There were also no surveys of brewers, publicans or any other individuals engaged in the trade to give even a remotely reliable set of figures to highlight a percentage of the population that imbibed themselves with sufficient regularity. If you're looking for quantification (as you should be, and clearly are!) the most reliable sources you can draw upon are petty court records. Unfortunately, most of these are not digitised and held in local archives, although I'm pretty sure some of the London Borough courts will have summary records online. You're welcome to use my own research on a sample of summary convictions in Swansea between 1870-80. It's a dataset of 221 crimes tried at the Petty Sessions (a level below the major circuit courts and limited to anti-social offences and petty thefts) amongst defendants who were overwhelmingly working class and listing demographic info, crime tried and sentencing patterns etc. It'll give you an idea of how prominent alcohol was in the misdemeanours of the working classes, which should in turn inform any opinion of its wider use in society.

There are plenty of newspaper reports and missives from letters pages on the social ill of excessive drinking by Magistrates and Borough authorities, and accompanying Head Constable reports on how many citizens were arrested for drink related offences, but the devil, as always, is in the detail. Out of the 221 petty trial proceedings above, nearly a quarter (53) were for specifically drink-related offences ('drunk and riotous, 'drunk and fighting' etc.) but upon reading the actual transcript, I'd hazard that drink played a part in at least 80-90% of them. The testimony from arresting officers or witnesses may not have mentioned it, but the areas of the town that crimes were committed in, and the behaviour of the defendant, meant that drink was highly likely to be an instigator. Have a look for yourself at the trial details and you'll see what I mean. Much of the anti-social behaviour, violent or otherwise, that passed through the summary court system was perpetrated by people who exhibited the characteristics of being drunk, even though the Magistrate or Justice of the Peace was being asked to consider a different offence. Much was dependant on whether or not the arresting officer or JP was present. Most defendants pled guilty without testimony in order to receive a shorter custodial sentence or avoid a hefty fine.

Anyway, I could go on! T, but I won't! It has to be said that alcohol use amongst the various strata of society is highly variable depending on location, time period and social class. Here's an article for the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy by James Kelly on the consumption and sociable use of alcohol in eighteenth-century Ireland which has some fascinating datasets. Like so many other areas of social history, it's incredibly difficult to conclude on the collective behaviour of enormous amounts of people from hundreds of years ago, but that doesn't detract from how fun it can be to investigate these kinds of things. Here's a really interesting micro history of the c.18th gin trade which exemplifies how niche this kind of analysis can become!

Edit: Provided a different context to judicial records of anti-social behaviour.

Edit 2: It also has to be said that any analysis of alcoholism or anti-social behaviour needs to be considered free from (or as free from as possible) contemporary judgements of historical character. Nobody's here to pigeonhole.

Judging by the frequency with which this came up in observations from tourists, immigrants, etc, early American drinking habits were considered excessive even by the standards of the age. W.J. Rorabaugh's The Alcoholic Republic focuses specifically on what he calls the "Great Alcoholic Binge" of 1790-1830, during which time Americans drank three times the amount of alcohol than they did in 1975. Nevertheless, while America certainly ranked in the higher echelon of consumption, it was on par with contemporary habits in Scotland and France.

It's difficult for us to draw solid conclusions because early sources are mostly preserved via temperance tracts of the 1840s-onward, which obviously have a vested interest in exaggerating the depravity of American drinking habits. Nevertheless, it's clear that American drinking habits prior to 1830 transcended just about every social demographic!

• Colonists consumed rum, until the American Revolution and the import duties led to a decrease in the consumption of distilled spirits. The rise of American distillation (whiskey and bourbon) in the early 19th century led to a sharp increase in the consumption of distilled spirits. Hard cider consumption was considerably heavier than that of beer.
• Male drinking can't be summarized better than Rorabaugh himself has done:

The male drinking cult pervaded all social and occupational groups. A western husbandman tarried at the tavern until drunk; an eastern harvest laborer received daily a half pint or pint of rum; a southern planter was considered temperate enough to belong to the Methodist Church if he restricted his daily intake of alcohol to a quart of peach brandy. A city mechanic went directly from work to the public house where he stayed late and spent his day's wages. Alcohol was such an accepted part of American life that in 1829 the secretary of war estimated that three-quarters of the nation's laborers drank daily at least 4 ounces of distilled spirits.

While men were consuming most of the nation's alcohol, women were nevertheless tippling as well, usually in the form of alcohol-based medicines. (Think: the unforgettable scene in 1909's Anne of Avonlea when Anne and Diana drink the raspberry cordial!) Rules went out the windows at parties. One pioneer dance featured a "whiskey bottle...[which] passed pretty quickly from mouth to mouth, exempting neither age nor sex."

One noteworthy aspect of early American drinking was its spread throughout the day. Rather than being confined to the evening, drinking was incorporated into many daily rituals. Here's an illustrative quote: "If I take a settler after my coffee, a cooler at nine, a bracer at ten, a whetter at eleven and two or three stiffners during the forenoon, who has any right to complain?" Less binge drinking, and more constant sipping may explain why the founding fathers weren't drooling onto their early legislation.