Humans in a variety of places around the world, including the large set of peninsulas today called "Europe", have been fermenting sugar-rich foodstuffs to make a variety of intoxicating beverages, for many thousands of years. But for a long time people didn't understand that there was an "active" ingredient in wine, beer, etc, that could be isolated from it's beverage of origin. It wasn't until Perso-Arabic alchemists in the middle ages figured out how to distill ethanol out of wine so that it could be used for other things. Originally this process was sufficiently expensive and time-consuming that the alcohols produced were used mainly for perfumes and medicines.

In a purely etymological sense, in English, alcohol originally meant a substance, but especially a fine powder, obtained alchemically via distillation or sublimation. Thus Early Modern scholars will speak of "alcohol of antimony" meaning antimony sulfides obtained from the destructive distillation of certain minerals. But these same sources by the late 1500s refer to "alcohol of wine" or "spirits of wine", which is from a description of it's properties pretty clearly the same substance we call ethanol today. Sometime in the later 18th century, as the underlying chemistry became better-understood, the word alcohol assumed it's current set of meanings. Only with the creation of modern organic chemical nomenclature in the 1850s do see the term "alcohols" used to refer to a set of similar long-chain organic compounds with a terminal hydroxyl group in the current scientific sense.

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