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!

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).

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

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!).