Jothar, with all respect to your rabbi home distilling was very common in Europe. Stills are easy to make, and the raw materials for hooch are quite inexpensive – grain, potatoes, fruit in season. People might have been too poor in certain times and places, but alcohol was mostly cheap and easy to come by. And given the prevalence of public drunkenness and deaths from alcohol poisoning in the historical record it took a fearsome toll.
Up until the fairly recently the average adult drank four or five liters of beer or wine a day. Coffee transformed Europe for Jew and Gentile alike. That urn of coffee in the yeshiva break room did more for the health and well-being of Jews than almost any other modern invention. cf. A History of the World in Six Glasses and The Devil’s Cup.