[wing-_-nuts]

I am not really a fan of liquor, but I do like the idea of having skills which are universally valuable.

If you air dropped me into a random village in Africa I doubt I could 'code for cassava' but I could almost certainly make a living if I knew how to set up a basic pot still and safely create booze.

[a_conservative]

You could sanitize and disinfect with that alcohol! You could also make extracts of any plants nearby that were useful. Whiskey and vanilla beans are sufficient to make vanilla extract!

[mothballed]

Sub saharan africa already has a very large informal distilling network (especially of bananas), a niche largely reserved for women in many regions (not sure for what the reason is for that exactly).

[Tangurena2]

Probably because it involves some form of cooking, which is a feminine-coded skill.

[IAmBroom]

Historically, brewing, fermenting, and distilling are all "wife chores", probably because of the feminine-coding you mention... until it becomes highly profitable, at which point men take it away.

Wine has always easy to trade. Mead and ciders, ditto.

Beer/ale, prior to preservative hops, doesn't keep long enough to be viable for intercity trade. The acceptance of hops in a communities' drinkers coincides with a gender change in brewers (documented in PhD dissertations and books).

Distillation always results in a shelf-stable product; ergo it quickly becomes male dominated in a cash society (even supplanting cash in colonial America!).