So who taught a young Jack Daniel how to distill what would become the world’s best-selling whiskey? Nathan "Nearest" Green, an enslaved Black master distiller, taught distilling techniques to Jack Daniel, founder of the Jack Daniel Tennessee Whiskey. Uncle Nearest, as he was fondly called by family and friends grew up in Lynchburg, Tennessee, and began working on the farm of a country preacher and distiller in Lincoln County around the mid-1800s. It was there that he learned the skill of distilling and specialized in a process of distillation known as sugar maple charcoal filtering which was also called the Lincoln County Process.
Nearest was such a skilled distiller in the process he specialized in but he kept working with the preacher in the Lincoln County and fortunately it was there that Jack Daniels met him. In the mid-1850s, Jack Daniels who was just a young white boy from a large family and who also lost his mother to a sudden illness at the age of four months began working as a chore boy for the preacher whom Uncle Nearest worked for. It is said that Jack Daniels was a curious young boy who kept asking about the smoke coming up through the hollow on the 338-acre property and why men kept hurrying back and forth from that area which he was never allowed to go with mules and wagons.
He never stopped asking, until the preacher whim he worked for decided to give in to his curiosity took him to the area on the property where the smoke came from. As later described in the boy’s biography, it is said that the preacher introduced the young boy to a “coal-black negro” which was uncle Nearest. He introduced Uncle Nearest by saying “This is Uncle Nearest. He’s the best whiskey maker I know of”. The preacher went further to ask Nearest to teach the young (Jack Daniels) everything he knew about distilling and also the process of sugar maple charcoal filtering. A request Nearest obliged and taught the young boy the special filtration process of the Tennessee whiskey.
