THE SLAVE WHO MADE JACK DANIEL’S
THE Welshman credited with creating iconic American bourbon Jack Daniel’s was actually taught how to make the Tennessee tipple by a slave, it has been revealed.
Brown-Forman, which owns the whiskey brand has, for the first time, acknowledged that the distiller (whose grandfather was born in Wales) was taught by a man named Nearis Green.
It was previously thought that a local businessman named Dan Call had taught Jack Daniel how to run his whiskey still as a young boy. But the history books have been rewritten, after it emerged that Nearis Green, one of Call’s slaves, was actually the brains behind the famous brand.
“On the Call farm, there was another instructor who not only taught Jack everything about distilling but infused in him a love for culture,” the firm reveals in a document put to- gether by Jack Daniel’s brand historian Nelson Eddy.
“It was Dan’s master distiller Nearis Green, a former slave in his mid 20s who also worked the farm.”
This was backed up In Blood and Whiskey, The Life and Times of Jack Daniel, where author Peter Krass said: “The bourbon tradition, with a Lincoln County twist, was what he (Daniel) learned from Uncle Nearis.”
Daniel went to work for Dan Call as a child and knew Green as “Uncle Nearis”.
He would spend evenings with the slave, who taught him to live by the land. A photo from aroundnd 1900 shows a man, thought to be one of Green’s sons, sitting byy Daniel and his workers. The picture is s unusual as black employees woulduld normally have stood at the back.ck. Ben A Green’s n’s 1967 biography, Jack Daniel’s legacy, also cites Green’s importance.rtance. It quotes Dan Call referring to “Uncle Nearest”. “Uncle Nearest is the best whiskey maker that I know of,” he told d Daniel. Call toldd Green he wanted Daniel too “become the world’s best st whiskey distiller”. “You helpelp teach him,” he said. At 16, when Green was still in charge of the still, Daniel was intent on expanding their market beyond the local shop.
“Uncle Nearis described the distilling process as he set about cooking a batch,” it says in the Jack Daniel’s document.
“These back-woodsmen didn’t rely on chemical equations. Here, intuition played the main role and each stiller had his own unique method.”
American slaves’ booze-making traditions stemmed from the corn beer and fruit spirits of West Africa. Many made alcohol illicitly while in slavery.
Despite his importance, Green and his family had all but been forgotten until now. Jack Daniel’s has been using its 150th anniversary to tell the tale. The company insists the story was never a secret – but now JD has begun embracing the Green story in tours, social media and marketing.
Jack Daniels spokesman Svend Jansen said: “Telling such uncommon stories during the Jack Daniel Distillery’s 150th anniversary is an appropriate way for us to observe this milestone.”
Slavery was brought to an end in 1865 with the ratification of the 13th Amendment.