I'm not college educated. My friend here who is educated in law claims there is no way in hell the native Americans didn't discover distillation.
My reason for believing the natives never discovered distillation:
No one had enough time to sit on their ass and wonder what would happen to corn gone to rot.
His reason for believing native Americans had distillation technology: how could you not cuz alcohol.
Is there any evidence of pre-colonialized American booze?
There are plenty of examples of American civilizations preparing and consuming alcoholic beverages before the arrival of Europeans. In Mesoamerica, mezcal and (thanks for the correction /u/400-Rabbits) pulque was an alcoholic beverages made from the agave plant. Admittedly I don't know how far back the history of this drink goes, but I can tell you that it was prepared and consumed long before Europeans arrived. Interestingly enough though, it was produced using a different operational chain than standard beers. Grain - used to make beer - is a complex carbohydrate that will not ferment naturally; an intermediate step is needed to begin the fermentation process, namely malting. In contrast to this, the flower harvested from the agave plant is capable of natural fermentation.
Certain Andean civilizations brewed chicha, again long before the Europeans arrived. It would be produced by chewing on harvested maize; the enzymes contained within saliva would begin the malting process allowing the maize to ferment. In this way the steps needed to produce chicha resembled those required to manufacture beer more so than mezcal or pulque did as this operational chain uses an intermediary step; maize would not ferment without the addition of saliva. This drink appears to have been quite popular. In fact, archaeologists recently discovered a sizable chicha factory around Cerro Baul, suggesting there was a certain need to produce this beverage on an industrial scale.
Source:
Janet Chrzan - Alcohol: Social Drinking in Cultural Context
There were plenty of alcoholic drinks in the pre-Columbian Americas. You can see /u/Pachacamac and /u/400-Rabbits discuss two prominent beverages called chicha and pulque here. If you have any more specific inquires on particular drinks or what certain people drank, feel free to ask/tag any of us!
You may be interested in this post in the Saturday Reading and Research | March 14, 2015 topic or this post made within a /r/badhistory topic. In summary, experiments have shown that certain vessel forms could have been used for distillation, but there is no concrete evidence that they were used in such a manner. Native Americans, like the Capacha culture of West Mexico, may have had distillation if we can pinpoint unique ceramic usewear and residue analysis markers to look for in future research.
Follow up question- I'm seeing lots of examples of M Meso/South American peoples' use of alcohol. What about North Anerica?
I'm not a pre-colonial scholar but I've actually HAD something the ancient Mayans made, called balche. An anthropology professor shared it with a bunch of us working on an archaeological dig. Is there a particular native American tribe you were discussing, or just all civilisations of the Americas?