If corn and potatoes are from the Americas, why weren’t Native Americans making whiskey and vodka before the Europeans showed up?
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many tribes did have alcohol; though not nearly as strong as what the Europeans had distilled. Alcohol was usually a ceremonial addition; and not a social beverage
There was at least tequila
The origins of tequila date back to around 250-300 A.D. when the Aztec Indians first fermented the juice of the agave to produce their ceremonial wine, ‘pulque’. Archaeological evidence from 300 A.D. suggests that agave was already important in the lives and culture of the Mexican Indians.
Distillation generally requires exploration of certain technologies, either glass or metal being the most obvious. You *can* perform distillation with clay pots, and it’s been done in the case of mezcal for example, which was made before European contact. As for why it wasn’t done with corn or potatoes the answer is pretty simple: why would you turn your food into liquor when you aren’t an agrarian society with an associated economy? They made alcoholic drinks out of corn, but distillation essentially removes nutrition from the drink and concentrates alcohol instead, which is pretty much the opposite of what most societies through history were interested in. It took alchemists in Europe and Arabia before the leap to ‘spirits’ was made, and initially it was conceived of as a medicine.
In any case when we think of vodka/whiskey production from corn and potatoes, or even later whiskey from rye and what, it was a way to extract wealth from excess crops. Natives generally didn’t have farms on those scales, and what excess they had was preserved as food.
So to sum up:
People with access to wild growing crops that weren’t useful as food, but were useful for alcohol (i.e. agave) did distill.
Natives were eating and preserving their food, not monetizing it at scale.
The tech to make really good vodka and whiskey at a large scale requires copper pots, and they simply didn’t have metallurgy at that scale.
They were not agrarian societies on a large scale.
What you are asking is “why didn’t Indigneous Americans have distillation”
As seen from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillation), many distillation are developed from alchemy, whose purpose is to get gold, elxir of immortality, or a panaceas to cure all disease.
So the question then becomes: whether Indigenous Americans’s philosophy and spirituality promote alchemy. At that, I have no idea – an open question for you to explore.
Distilling did not develop independently in North or South America in part because, as another person pointed out the level of metallurgy needed did not exist.
This does not mean alcohol did not exist in the Americas prior to European contact. I wrote my master thesis on the consumption of corn beer called chicha, the stylistics, iconography, and potential passing of ideology via the specific vessels used to drink it by a pre-Inkan society moving from its core along the southern coast of Lake Titicaca in the Andes of Peru moving out to its periphery on the southern coast of Peru and trading/potential colonies in the highlands of Bolivia.
Potatoes remained a core subsistence crop in the area.
To clarify a pretty key misconception in the question, corn and potatoes are not integral components of vodka nor whisky. In fact both beverages existed prior to the Columbian exchange (which brought those crops to Europe). Before that whisky and vodka would be made from grains like rye, wheat, millet, barley, etc and in fact they are still mostly made of those things today. Outside of America corn is a very unusual ingredient in whisky, and even in American whisky production those other grains are still used.
I’ve always wondered this and also wondered why they never built castle type infrastructures that would outlive their civilization like the Europeans did. . Kinda seems like they were out here just sorta, hanging out I guess?
I don’t want to sound harsh, but the Europeans were literally centuries ahead of the Native Americans when it came to science, tech, and general “civilization”. No knock on the people, but they were way, way, way behind where Europe was. I don’t really think you can compare those apples and oranges.
Distillation is only necessary if you want to concentrate your alcohol. If you just want to make an alcoholic drink, you can ferment anything that has sugar (fruit, some root crops, palm sap , maple sap, sorghum). And peoples in North and South America did just that.
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