This is not accurate- alcohol was widely made from many different cultivars, sometimes from any and every available one (e.g. the Ancestral Puebloans and their descendants). The corn beer called tiswin from the American Southwest is probably the best known to the average person. An entire broader style is called chicha, and you can find it everywhere from Northern Mexico to the Andes. I'm not versed enough to comment in other regions (Where are my paleobots at????) other than essentially every major inhabited region of North America, Mesoamerica and South America had some form of indigenous alcohol production that's now well documented via years of updated analysis of drinking vessels (It also helps that many of these drinks are still readily made today). Sometimes they were used ritually, but there's a lot that we don't know- the ethnographic accounts at the time of contact were not the most reliable, and being framed in potentially biased lenses.

EDIT: I forgot to mention pulque, which started out as a ritual drink but eventually just became your every day fermented maguey cuppa.

There's a large misconception that pre-Columbian peoples had never discovered alcohol, and that's patently untrue, but I think the average person is able to understand this more as we re-examine both the historical record (testimonies that a less principled researcher might have ignored) and the archaeological record with advances in material science. It's not cheap or always prioritized to run material analyses on archaeobotanical material, and when you consider the lifespan of a scientific paper, it could legitimately be decades before relevant findings make their way into more accessible scientific journalism and educational materials.

There's also some lingering phrenological pseudoscientific ghosts in the historical dialogue related to this question, which implies First Nations people were genetically inferior to colonizers by being unable to handle alcohol because they had "never discovered it." These stereotypes have persisted over the years in print and media, and especially have become conflated with rampant alcoholism in many modern aboriginal communities- which has much stronger correlations to generational trauma and a centuries-long cycle of structural inequality.

It's a little meta to your question, but I think this is a relevant time to explain why you might have never heard about these things as a layperson.