title_body: What beers or other drinks did Native Indians brew in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans in 1492?
upvoted_answer: From 'Indians of North America' by Harold Driver.
  
  The distribution of alcoholic beverages falls almost wholly within the bounds of horticulture. However, there was a sizeable area in Northeast Mexico which was without agriculture and where wine was made from wild plants. For the world as a whole, there is a definite correlation between alcoholic beverages and agriculture, although negative instances can also be found in the Old World. The explanation is a simple one--the liquors were made principally from domesticated plants. It is commonly assumed either that knowledge of the fermenting of these plants spread with the plants or that the making of the liquor from the plant could spread only as far as the plant was known.
  e.g. Agave and Dasylirion -- Two distinct plants were widely used in the Southwest, Meso-America, and Northeast Mexico for the production of alcoholic beverages. They were even more widely used as food. It has been conjectured that before the time when agriculture was common, say, in the second or third millennium BC these plants were a staple food or even the staple food of a large part of the region. In the Southwest, the wine was usually made from the cooked juice of the agave, not from the fresh juice as in Meso-America.
  
  So from this I'm going to infer that technologically most native tribes who knew of fermentation would have been restricted to that form of alcohol production, and so wine would be the only form of alcohol available pre-European contact. It's also safe to say that wine production only occurred within cultures that had ferment-able produce available to them.