This appears to be focused on post-15th century America and England; I was talking about world history, where each of these drinks' use predates Western social interpretations. But you're right that economic status often dictated social behavior, and so different things were drank by different social strata, but often because that's just what a person of that social class would do. Tea was originally treated as a very high social strata drink, but by the 18th century nearly all colonial americans were drinking it, up until the revolution supplanted it with alternatives like coffee.
Cities and towns have often historically been located next to rivers not only for transportation, but for agriculture, to remove waste, and for people to drink it. In order to have a "city" you have to solve the transportation of waste, which involves getting in water, and evidence for this goes back well before 3,000BC. The locations for cities were often chosen for good water quality, or avoided due to poor water quality. If water wasn't nearby, they'd pipe it in, and it they couldn't do that, they'd dig wells, often hundreds of em. In Rome, access to water completely transformed the idea of a city and built the biggest one in history up to that point. Cities often had not only public wells, but also fountains specifically for both drinking and hand-washing.
Some famous cities in history had poor access to water, and as they grew they suffered due to a lack of sanitation and clean water. But that has nothing to do with who drank what or for what purpose. All societies have drank different things for different reasons, but almost never due to an inability to get drinking water.
Even today, remote villages that are barely touched by modern man don't boil water or drink alcohol or tea. They just drink straight-up water, and 100,000 years of evolution has proved the idea that we figured out how not to die from it.
