Yea, my ‘urban legend’ would have been more like: pre-sanitation city-people drank a lot of weakly alcoholic beverages because those who developed such a habit were a bit more likely to survive and reproduce. Probably not a well reasoned conscious choice other than that I would assume they would drink non-dirty beverages in favor of visibly dirty water.
Heck it was apparently a bit of a struggle to get 1850’s London to accept that the pump right next to the cesspit who’s neighbors were all dying of Cholera was actually a problem.
