Was looking up the history of soju, learned the process of making it came to Korea because of the Mongols and it was called the Levantine distillation process. This lead me to learn that both the root word for alcohol and the process of making the hard stuff came from the Arabs.
All I can say is thank you Arabic science for making my new years that much better!
Alcohol has a neat etymology. It's the same root as Khol, the dark eye make up youstereotypically see on ancient egyptians. If I remember correctly "kohl" went from meaning fine consmetics to any highly refined substance. When ibn Hayyan figured out how to distill alcohol it came to be associated with refined beer or wine or whatever. Then al-kohol migrated in to English as alcohol.