Well, speaking of alcohol, allow me to give some facts about it.
The first alcoholic drink likely discovered was mead, considering it's so simple to make, researchers hypothesize that maybe a beehive got flooded with rainwater, then yeast got to eating the sugars in the honey, which creates alcohol, and then an early human discovered it. Hell, chimps get drunk on palm wine, so it's not outlandish.
After that, beer and wine are the next oldest, as documents on recipes go back to around 5000 BCE for wine, and around 8500-5500 BCE for beer.
Distillation goes back to around 1200 BCE with ancient Akkadian tablets, and the Ancient Greeks really refined distillation, though they were distilling chemicals. The earliest known records for distilling alcohol come from the Middle Ages where they were distilling grain alcohol that the Scottish and Irish called "uscie baetha" which, translated in Latin is "aqua vitae" and both mean the water of life in English.
"Uscie baetha" was then anglicized to "whisky" and thus whisk(e)y goes back to the Middle Ages, and documentation suggests the Irish made it first around 1405.
In fact, in the Annals of Clannmacnoise, it mentions an Irish chieftain who died from "a surfeit of aqua vitae." In other words, he drank himself to death.
Talking of mead, some people suggest that just pure mead, that is, honey, water, and yeast is actually not as common as you might think, as a lot of cultures make mead traditionally in different ways, such as melomels, metheglins, and so forth. Melomels are meads with fruit added to them, and metheglins are spiced meads.
People get concerned with homebrewing, because they hear about methanol, which is the unsafe alcohol to consume, because a lot of people confuse fermentation with distillation, thinking that at some point in making cider, mead, wine, or beer that you have to distill it. No, those drinks are fermented with yeast, and the amount of methanol produced in fermentation is so incredibly small, that to get a lethal dose of methanol, you'd have to consume 10 gallons of cider, mead, wine, or beer in one sitting, and if you do that, you have a bigger problem on your hands than methanol poisoning.
Now, being concerned about methanol is legitimate, providing you're making a distilled spirit, as distillers make cuts. Why? Well distillation by definition increases the concentration of alcohol, so you have to be aware of methanol, and make cuts. This is also why distillers have specific distilling runs, to maximize the amount of safe alcohol to consume, and to cut out the dangerous alcohols like methanol. In other words, it's more involved, requires training, experience, and this is why at least in the United States, you need a license to distill.
Furthermore, the last fun fact about alcohol is that it's always been a big deal. There's some hints of evidence to suggest that that was one big reason why Ancient Egypt is so wealthy, because they produce an abundance of grains, such that any surplus is used to make beer, so it just made sense to buy, sell, and trade it, as well as consume it. Admittedly, the evidence for this isn't 100%, but enough to raise an eyebrow.
