I find it strange that people think that intoxication would be a bigger motivator than avoiding death from starvation. Its just such a strange argument to me. I feel like this deserves a longer answer, but Im not really sure how to expand on the answer because I haven't seen any credible evidence to support the theory. If you have any specific questions I'd be happy to elaborate.

This is technically more of an anthropology question. As our knowledge about the earliest humans to brew alcohol are not from written sources. Unless you want to talk about legend and mythology, but it doesn't sound like you do.

But sure, various anthropologists have written papers or books about the importance of alcohol in the earliest civilizations. The conjecture I've usually seen is that it acted as a "social lubricant" allowing people to get along in a closer-knit society.

Now if you want to talk about the more recent times alcohol played a role in recorded history, we can discuss things like the British Naval Rum ration, and the related invention of grog, or the Whiskey Rebellion in the early United States. Or how alcohol would drive things as great as the choice of national religion based on which religions allowed drinking and which didn't, or the temperance movement, or moonshining, or how the impact of studies commissioned by scotch distillers to increase their efficiency (and figure out profit) allowed the foundation of the principles of thermodynamics which eventually, pretty much directly caused massive improvements in the steam-engine.

I am glad that someone has mentioned that it didn't have as much to do with not having clean water as you often hear. That's a misconception that I've heard repeated for decades and it comes from a misunderstanding of an event in the history of London. It implies that entire civilizations, over the course of thousands of years weren't smart enough to figure out that all you needed to do to make water safe was to boil it. You don't need to understand germ theory to figure that one out.

(Somewhat) of a follow up question, did alcohol production also arise in areas where cannabis or some other psychoactive substances were available?