Nathan “Nearest” Green was born into slavery in Maryland around 1820. No one recorded his exact birth date. No one wrote down his parents’ names. But by the 1850s, people in Lincoln County, Tennessee, knew one thing about him: he made exceptional whiskey.
Green was enslaved by a firm called Landis & Green, which rented him out to local farms . One of those farms belonged to Dan Call, a preacher who also ran a distillery. Call recognized Green’s talent. He put Green to work making whiskey using a charcoal filtering method that produced a remarkably smooth spirit.
Around 1850, a seven year old orphan named Jasper “Jack” Daniel came to work on Call’s farm. The boy was small, curious, and obsessed with the distillery. He pestered Call until the preacher finally gave in. Call took the boy to Green and said, “Uncle Nearest is the best whiskey maker that I know of. You help me teach him” .
For the next several years, Green taught Daniel everything. He showed him how to burn sugar maple wood into charcoal. He showed him how to filter the raw whiskey through that charcoal before putting it in barrels to age. That process, now called the Lincoln County Process, defines Tennessee whiskey to this day. Food historians trace the technique to West Africa, where people used charcoal to purify water .
The Civil War ended in 1865. Green became a free man. Daniel bought Call’s distillery and renamed it after himself. He immediately hired Green as his first master distiller . That makes Green the first documented African American master distiller in United States history.
Daniel also hired Green’s sons. George, Eli, and Edde Green all worked at the distillery . Over the next 150 years, seven generations of Green’s descendants would follow them. As of 2017, three direct descendants still worked at Jack Daniel’s . The company’s official history, however, barely mentioned Green.
In 2016, Fawn Weaver, a New York Times bestselling author, visited the Jack Daniel’s distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee. She took three tours. She did not hear Green’s name once . She decided to find out why.
Weaver spent the next year gathering over 10,000 documents . She interviewed Green’s descendants. She pored over census records, property deeds, and newspaper clippings. She proved that Daniel had not stolen Green’s recipe. Daniel had learned it, respected it, and credited Green privately his entire life. The problem was that the company that bought Jack Daniel’s in 1965 had not bothered to preserve that part of the story.
In 2017, Brown-Forman, the parent company of Jack Daniel’s, officially recognized Green as the brand’s first master distiller . The company added his story to its tours and placed his picture next to Daniel’s in its corporate Hall of Fame . It was 150 years late, but the record was finally corrected.
Weaver did not stop there. She launched her own whiskey brand, Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey, named in Green’s honor. The brand has become the fastest growing independent American whiskey brand in U.S. history . Its master blender is Victoria Eady Butler, Green’s great-great-granddaughter .
The success of Uncle Nearest proves something important. Recognizing Black contributions to American industry is not just about correcting the historical record. It is about creating new economic opportunities for the descendants of the people who built this country. Seven generations of Greens worked for Jack Daniel’s. The eighth generation is now running its own brand.
Nearest Green’s exact death date remains unknown. He appears in the 1880 census and then vanishes from the record. But his techniques have survived in every bottle of Jack Daniel’s sold in every country on earth. And now, finally, his name is on the label.
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Sources:
- The Whiskey Wash (2025)
- Wikiwand – Nathan “Nearest” Green
- Publishers Weekly – Love & Whiskey (2024)
- History Channel (2022)
- BlackPast.org (2017)
- VOA News (2021)
- Town & Country Magazine (2020)
