Actually, while this is certainly true due to the brewing traditions of England, Scotland, Germany, the Netherlands, and even Ireland and other locales, a somewhat "forgotten" beverage that was very popular in North America was cider. Johnny Chapman Appleseed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Appleseed
was not propagating apple orchards just for applesauce, apple butter, and baking after all...
A tumbler of cider was often enough a favorite breakfast beverage in colonial-era and early 19th-century America...
Coffee became a patriotic alternative to tea, and since it promoted sobriety in the notoriously rum-soaked and alcoholic-prone navy, it was issued as part of the rations to the tune of 2-pints per sailor per day! That's a lot of coffee... By the Jacksonian period, coffee was already a very popular beverage.
While beer and brewing is very old in the United States, the relative quantities drunk in my post citing Rorabaugh demonstrate that it really caught on in the mid-to-late 19th century.
During the years of the U.S. Civil War, the British drank 32 gallons of beer and ale per person per annum/ per capita. In the United States, it was more like 4 1/2 gallons. Before Prohibition and the 18th Amendment, of course, there were very, very many small breweries everyplace... Just a few when Prohibition was finally suspended by the 21st Amendment's ratification in 1933... "Happy days are here again..." in the midst of the Great Depression.
Not so much before, when whiskey (and rum) were "it."