The Master Distiller Behind Jack Daniel's — and Seven Generations After Him

America’s First Known African American Master Distiller

Nathan “Nearest” Green, born around 1820, holds a title few people know to look for: the first African American master distiller on record in the United States. Green built his craft as a “head stiller” — the 19th-century term for what’s now called a master distiller — and the whiskey-making techniques he perfected became the foundation of one of the most recognized spirits brands in the world, Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey.

Teaching the Boy Who Would Found Jack Daniel’s

In the 1850s, a young Jack Daniel went to work for Dan Call, a preacher, grocer, and distiller in Lynchburg, Tennessee. For decades, company lore credited Call himself with teaching Daniel to distill. In June 2016, however, The New York Times published reporting — built on oral history that local families and historians had passed down for generations, alongside a thin archival trail — that pointed to a different teacher: Nathan Green, one of the people Call held enslaved.

Call is reported to have introduced the two by telling the young Daniel, “Uncle Nearest is the best whiskey maker that I know of,” and asking Green directly to mentor the boy: “I want [Jack] to become the world’s best whiskey distiller — if he wants to be. You help me teach him.” One biographer later wrote that Green, only a few years older than Daniel, “taught him all about the still.”

Green was one of the few people enslaved by the firm Landis & Green — who had likely hired him out to Call for a fee — who chose to stay on and work alongside Call after the Emancipation Proclamation. When Daniel opened his own distillery in 1866, a year after the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery in the United States, he immediately hired two of Green’s sons, George and Eli, onto his staff. At least three of Green’s sons and four of his grandchildren would go on to work at the distillery — seven straight generations of the Green family have worked there in total, with three direct descendants still on staff as of 2017.

Away from the still, Green was known as a lively entertainer who played the fiddle, a trait his descendants say passed down to his son Jesse. He married Harriet Green, and together they raised eleven children — nine sons and two daughters.

Recognition, a Century and a Half Later

For most of the 20th century, Green’s role went uncredited in the story Jack Daniel’s told about itself. That began to change once his story reached a wider public. In August 2017, Brown-Forman — the corporation that owns the Jack Daniel Distillery — officially recognized Green as the distillery’s first head stiller on its company website, and that October added his legacy to the official visitor tour and a permanent display at the Jack Daniel’s Visitors Center.

Author Fawn Weaver, moved by Green’s story, founded the Nearest Green Foundation, which has since built a museum and memorial park in his honor and funds college scholarships for his descendants. In 2017 the foundation helped launch Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey, a brand built to carry his name forward. Its master distiller, Victoria Eady Butler, is Green’s great-great-granddaughter — and the first known African American woman to hold the title of master distiller in the whiskey industry.

Green’s name isn’t on the bottle that made his techniques famous. But a century and a half later, it’s on a company website, a visitor center wall, a foundation, a whiskey brand, and — most enduringly — in the work of his own great-great-granddaughter, still distilling.