When it comes to whiskey, the name Jack Daniel’s is about as all-American as you can get when it comes to the world of classic spirits.
But while the name Jack Daniel’s is synonymous with whiskey, historians now believe it was someone else who was behind the creation of the iconic whiskey brand.
According to a story featured on Fox News, Nathan Nearest Green, a slave-turned-distiller was the person who taught Jack Daniel how to make whiskey.
When Daniel opened Jack Daniel’s Distillery in 1866, he hired Green, newly emancipated a year earlier, as the operation’s first master distiller.
“We think there was a special bond between Jack and Nearest and Jack and Nearest’s family,” Jack Daniel’s historian Nelson Eddy told Fox News.
Green’s descendants have worked at the distillery since its inception and they still help produce the whiskey today, more than 150 years later, he said.
The signature processes behind Jack Daniel’s, and Tennessee whiskey in general, include techniques, some experts argue, known in western Africa — where conquered tribesman, Green’s ancestors, were sold into slavery to Europeans and shipped around the world.
Green’s story has long been known to spirits historians and shared by the Jack Daniel’s Distillery.
“It’s a story of Black and White working together — you can boil it down to something really that simple and really human,” Charles K. Cowdery, author of the book “Bourbon, Straight: The Uncut and Unfiltered Story of American Whiskey,” told Fox News.
Green’s influence is gaining wider audience now, thanks in large part to Nearest Green Distillery in Shelbyville, Tennessee, which has earned critical acclaim for its products and praise for its devotion to whiskey history since opening in 2017.
“Nearest Green is definitely the godfather of Tennessee whiskey,” Fawn Weaver, founder of Nearest Green Distillery, said in a 2019 interview with FOX Business.
Jack Daniel’s Tennessee sour-mash whiskey is the top-selling whiskey and most globally recognized spirit made in the United States.