What kind of alcohol are you talking about?

In alcohol such as wine blind taste tests have shown that there is little difference between the mid-level and expensive brands. A lot comes down to people's expectations instead of whats actually in the bottle. Although some of the truly cheap wines are god awful. Thats down to the quality of the grapes and processing.

For distilled spirits it depends on the type of spirit. Some require filtering to remove certain chemicals that can effect the taste. The extra filtration steps add cost to the production process and increase price. Aged whiskeys are more expensive because of the aging process. Its a heavy investment with a lot of risk to produce a product that you have to store for a decade or more before the first bottle hits the shelf. Higher quality spirits will usually have some extra level of processing/production that adds to the cost.

Beer tends to come down to the quality and variety of ingredients, as well as volume of production. A beer that is produced in gigantic vats a hundred thousand gallons at a time with basic cheap ingredients is gonna cost less than one brewed in a 500 gallon vat with a selection of premium ingredients. And the taste is purely a matter of personal preference. I know people that prefer miller lite to high quality micro-brews. They just have a taste preference.