How would a feudal society work if, instead of land, the class of nobility owned the means of producing alcohol?

The title pretty much says it all, but the idea here is that alcohol (or at least some forms of it) is as important or more important as food for this society. It can be understood to have essential vitamins and minerals that make it necessary, or it can be a different society that's just incredibly dependent on it socially. Either way, the end result is that access to alcohol is essential for survival. In this society, the means of producing alcohol are owned by a class of "Brewlords." <br><br>We can imagine two ways this might work. In the first, there is only one Brewlord, who holds a monopoly on alcohol production. The Brewlord may grant licenses to different groups of people allowing them to produce alcohol in exchange for a share of the profit. The Brewlord could have a large organization for distributing alcohol to the masses, but they could also set up a system in which some vassals get exclusive rights to distribute it. In the second, there are many Brewlords. These Brewlords are guaranteed a certain minimum amount of land on which they can grow ingredients for alcohol. Depending on the specific design of the society, these could be simple Brewlords, who are guaranteed land but must defend it themselves. They're vassals of a higher lord, who will mobilize a large army to defend them if need be. The alternative is that these Brewlords have a lot of autonomy, and organize into confederacies to defend one another in case of war. The second model has a lot of similarities to Prussia, but you could imagine a lot of other systems working as well. <br><br>However you structure the system, you would need some other class of people working the land. This could be a separate class of vassals, like those described above who worked the land in exchange for protection by the lord. This would be a perpetual problem for the Brewlords, though, because the vassals would need to be paid in alcohol, which is finite. The Brewlords could pay the workers in alcohol and keep them perpetually drunk. Alcoholism would be a persistent problem in such a society. This system resembles the one that Tsarist Russia used in Poland, by the way, in which the peasants were paid in vodka but were always in debt to the government because their pay was not enough to cover the tax on vodka. <br><br>Alternatively, the Brewlords could hire wage labor. This system certainly has its own problems, but the Brewlords would avoid alcoholism and they could pay in cash rather than alcohol. <br><br>There's obviously a lot of other stuff you could build out in a society organized around alcohol production, but these are the two most interesting features it seems to me.