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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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.
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