These links are not to discourage further questions or data.

I know that people in the 1700s drank alcohol more than water because alcohol was safer

That appears to be a myth. It is covered in the FAQ under Water, Wine and Beer, especially the answers by /u/Qweniden and /u/idjet.

Searching this subreddit for

alcohol water

led to You often here anecdotal that "Alcohol was so prevalent during the Middle Ages because it was safer than water".. /u/eternalkerri stated

We have evidence as far back as Roman times that Europeans knew how to recognize safe water sources over bad as evidenced by writers such as Frontinus and Vetruvius. Hippocrates advocated boiling water around 300 B.C. to remove impurities, and this knowledge would not have been lost in Medieval times.

People of the Indian subcontinent were even filtering water through a system very similar to modern municipal fine particulate filtration (larger aggregate down to fine sand filtration).

There's a pointer to another /u/idjet reply in How Drunk were people of Medieval Europe?. He pointed out that the brewing wasn't as sterile as in modern times, and they were watering their alcohol anyway.

These are archived posts, so you won't be able to add to them.