looks around the forum, takes a sip of beer out of a coffee mug, coughs we need a sheriff and jail 
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That’s more of a modern myth, really. The rather thin beer of Medieval times didn’t last all that long and has far too little alcohol to help kill off bacteria. There’s no evidence that people drank it because they thought it was cleaner. People still drank a lot of water, and they knew that boiling it helped (even though they had no idea about bacteria). They pretty brutally handled anyone believed to have dirtied their wells.
People preferred beer because it tastes good, is more filling (liquid bread, baby ) and because it’s not free. It’s a status symbol, showing others that you’re not the poorest of the poor that had to drink only water. Solely living on bread and water was a penance. Most people couldn’t afford a lot of beer though, so they likely drank more water than beer on average.
Still, all the classes regularly drank water, even those that could afford all the wine they could possibly consume. The real cause of all those diseases wasn’t bad water quality, but urbanization and crowded living situations.
I remember seeing estimates of Medieval beer consumption lower than the average today in countries like the Czech Republic or Germany, despite the beer being much weaker.
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I’m not an expert, you may be right. My background is Edinburgh, maybe it’s a local thing, we weren’t blessed with a handy river, and didn’t recieve a piped water supply from the nearby hills until the 17th century, prior to that Edinburgh’s water supply was very poor. We had a loch on one side of the town into which most of the town’s sewage ran after making its way down the narrow alleys, and on the other side was a shallow and rather muddy loch, water from that loch was pumped up by means of a windmill to an area nowadays called Bristo Port. This was the Port (gate) through the town wall to Bristo, (from brewster) where hundreds of brewster wives brewed copious amounts of beer.
Even after we had piped a water supply down from the hills (using hollowed-out tree-trunks as pipes) alcohol intake was still very high, many men of the town were in drinking clubs which met all evening in dark, pokey pubs squirreled down the many back alleys. These clubs were significant meeting places during the Scottish Enlightenment of the late 18th century, many great minds met and mixed. One of my favourite characters from the time was our local poet Robert Fergusson. He was the person who inspired Robert Burns to write his poetry in Scots (Burns’ earlier less-remembered works are in English) Sadly, Robert Fergusson was also a big drinker, fell down a flight of stairs, was incarcerated in our Bedlam hospital where he passed away. He’s now remembered in a very jaunty walking-statue down the Canongate near Holyroodhouse.
Anyway, maybe it’s a local thing. Even just last week, I was up the West End with a friend, and the whiff of brewery still hangs in the air from the west of the town, it’s one of Edinburgh’s smells…
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I remember watching a documentary about coffee many years ago. A fascinating story. What really caught my attention that in France, before coffee was introduced to their society, the average worker drank something like 8-10 liters of wine every day. Their production was down easily 50% then after coffee was introduced. Hence cafes, which competed with wine and where the women went. Due to this, wives coerced their husbands into coffee or no nooky nooky for you. Just a little history.
My take on pubs is they are a prevalent part of western society and should be part of it with warts and all. Yes, this game is based on western values and not Asian or Arab. However, having a sheriff and not allowing weapons into the pub would help with the mortality rate that our towns are now experiencing. There does need to be some logic involved.
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Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled!
Lived there for a year when I was 15/16, lovely city! 
Proper alcoholism was of course both a thing in Medieval times, and still is today. But I doubt that was ever the majority of working people…
My hometown also had at some point hundreds of “breweries”, women brewing at home, despite the maybe 20k inhabitants (which was still large for the time and area). They certainly enjoyed their beers!
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No human drinks 10 liters of wine every day over an extended period of time! 
That must be another of these unsubstantiated claims that get repeated often enough that no one questions them anymore. It would be like 1.7% blood alcohol for the average man, taking about 111 hours for the body to metabolize on average… every 24h day. 
Yes, I’m recalling from memory, but I do remember it was close to double digits, a ridiculous amount. They weren’t just sitting around getting drunk, they actually worked 14 hour days because of their poor productivity, at least that’s what the documentary was claiming.
It was probably heavily diluted wine as well.
I remember a friend telling me about vineyard with a deep dent in the beam over the entrance for the carriages. They claimed the coachman was partially paid in the wine he kept delivering all day, so he always returned proper drunk, but his horse knew the way. It did however not manage to wake him up before hitting the beam every evening!
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