Nathan Green, known as Nearest, was born around 1820 and died around 1890. He is the first African-American master distiller on record in the United States, and the technique he perfected still defines an entire category of American whiskey.
He belongs in a chapter on bourbon slightly awkwardly — what he made is Tennessee whiskey, a separate legal category — but his influence on American distilling is too central to leave out.
Who he worked for
Green was enslaved, and a detail that is frequently reported incorrectly is worth stating carefully: he was not owned by Dan Call, the preacher and distiller on whose farm he worked. Documentation indicates Green was owned by a firm known as Landis & Green, who hired him out to Call for a fee. He was the head distiller of that operation.
The Lincoln County Process
Green's craft was charcoal mellowing, the step that separates Tennessee whiskey from bourbon. Before the clear, unaged spirit goes into a barrel, it is filtered slowly through several feet of tightly packed sugar maple charcoal.
This is not colour filtration or a cosmetic finish. The charcoal strips out heavier congeners and fusel compounds that would otherwise carry through into the aged spirit, producing a distinctly softer, rounder new-make before maturation even begins. Doing it well is a matter of judgement — how the maple is burned, how densely the vat is packed, how fast the spirit is allowed to drip — and Green was the acknowledged master of it.
Teaching Jack Daniel
When a young orphan named Jasper Newton "Jack" Daniel came to work on Call's farm, Call put him under Green's instruction. The company's own lore long credited Call as Daniel's teacher; the historical evidence points to Green.
After emancipation, Green stayed on. When Daniel registered his own distillery in 1866, he made Green his first master distiller. Two of Green's sons, George and Eli, were employed by Daniel directly, and members of the Green family worked alongside the Daniel operation for generations afterwards.
What remains unknown
There is no known photograph of Nearest Green, and his burial place is not known. For most of the following century his name did not appear in the official history of the whiskey he helped create. That changed in 2017 with the launch of Uncle Nearest, a brand founded expressly to put his contribution on the record and on a label — and, through the associated foundation, to support his descendants.
The technique, meanwhile, never went anywhere. Every bottle of Tennessee whiskey that passes through sugar maple charcoal — Jack Daniel’s included — is running Green's process.