I learned the secret in my mid-20s whilst brewing my own cider as a poor student.
Take some decent apple juice without preservatives. Add a bit of yeast; baking yeast for bread at the supermarket will do just fine. Observe basic sanitation principles. Add some sugar, perhaps 150 g per litre of juice. Leave the concoction in a cool, dry place for a few months. A one-way seal for the CO2 release is preferable (a balloon works) but is not strictly required; leave the cap on loose. Carefully pour off the result into a new vessel. Let this settle for another month.
A very palatable drink results at about 4 - 5% alcohol by volume. People figured this out thousands of years ago. And they did not have plastic bottles, germ theory, or infinite hot water on tap. It's trivial to make an alcoholic beverage. The rest is finesse. And posturing.
I remember the USSR during Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign - you could walk out onto the balcony of a large apartment building, and see hands waving at you from most other balconies. Not people's hands, mind you - it was rubber gloves, used as a one-way seal on top of large glass bottles used to brew fruit wine. The fruit itself varied depending on what people had access to and the season - I've seen apple, plum, cherry, blackcurrant etc.
There's an entire book (most likely more than one) dedicated to various method of making alcohol at home. My chemistry teacher in high school had one.
Among the methods were fruits, vegetables, plastic bags, and some types of wood. Obviously, the resulting alcohol wouldn't taste like 20yo whiskey, and will probably kill you a bit faster, but the methods were solid.
Beer was probably "discovered" when mashed up grains started fermenting wildly. It's definitely not difficult to make alcohol if one desires!
I do think something can be said to effort put in vs what you get however - I've enjoyed some very good beer that took a little bit more work than letting some grain lying around ferment. Of course, on the other hand, plenty of beers are brewed in Belgium using essentially that method, so it all comes down to one's taste I suppose.
Sugar + yeast will result in alcohol. And yeast is literally everywhere. You can practically just open any fruit juice, let it sit for a while, and you'll have a pretty good chance of getting an alcoholic beverage at the end.
We go to great lengths to keep our fruit juices from fermenting. In fact, non-fermented juice is a relatively recent invention in human history.
> I expelled all my breath and sucked down another glass. Vinegary, yeasty, with a rusty shank of an aftertaste. I was feeling a slight buzz, but I didn’t think I could stomach another glass. It was booze all right, but two glasses was my non-incarcerated limit.
Take some decent apple juice without preservatives. Add a bit of yeast; baking yeast for bread at the supermarket will do just fine. Observe basic sanitation principles. Add some sugar, perhaps 150 g per litre of juice. Leave the concoction in a cool, dry place for a few months. A one-way seal for the CO2 release is preferable (a balloon works) but is not strictly required; leave the cap on loose. Carefully pour off the result into a new vessel. Let this settle for another month.
A very palatable drink results at about 4 - 5% alcohol by volume. People figured this out thousands of years ago. And they did not have plastic bottles, germ theory, or infinite hot water on tap. It's trivial to make an alcoholic beverage. The rest is finesse. And posturing.