It was just booze, not hate, that fueled the deadly beating of an Ecuadorian immigrant with a baseball bat, a defense lawyer claimed yesterday at the start of his client’s retrial for the December 2008 killing in Bushwick.

Prosecutors charge that Keith Phoenix, 30, attacked José Sucuzhanay, hurling anti-gay and anti-Hispanic epithets at the victim walking arm-in-arm with his brother, Romel.

“Alcohol was running through this [incident] like the Nile River runs through Egypt,” Phoenix’s lawyer, Philip Smallman, told jurors yesterday.