The Nathan Green Process

In 2016, the curtain was pulled back on Tennessee whiskey when The New York Times reported on the story of Nathan “Nearest” Green, the enslaved Black man who shared his process of charcoal-filtering whiskey with a young runaway who would later become known as Jack Daniel.It was on preacher and store owner Daniel Call’s property that Nathan Green (also known as Uncle Nearest) was making what many in Lynchburg, Tennessee, and the surrounding area considered the best whiskey in the world during the mid-1800s. While the mash bill was similar to the whiskies being made just one state over in Kentucky, what made Green’s whiskey distinct was his charcoal filtration process. The practice of using charcoal to filter water and purify food had been used along the western coast of Africa for centuries, and it is likely that this knowledge was passed down to Green through his ancestors.

This process for making Tennessee whiskey, called the Lincoln County Process, was created by Nathan Green. He chose to cut down sugar maple trees, turn them into charcoal, and filter his unaged whiskey through it before barreling. It was Green who taught a young Jasper Daniel (later known as Jack) this process. When Jack purchased preacher Daniel Call’s distilling equipment, he asked Green to move down the road to help him run the new distillery. So if Nathan "Nearest" Green is the reason Tennessee whiskey is as popular as it is, the reason Jack Daniel’s became one of the best-selling spirits in the world, the reason Chris Stapleton sings about how smooth Tennessee whiskey is, then why is it called the Lincoln County Process and not the Nathan Green Process?

Newton’s Law of Gravity isn’t called the Cambridge Law of Gravity. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity isn’t called the Ulm Theory of Relativity. Chekhov’s Gun isn’t called Theater’s Gun, and it is even called Pavlovian because while the focus was the dog, it was Ivan Pavlov who did the work. Nathan Green happened to be a Black man who lived in a time when Black people had zero rights. Whether it was a calculated move by Jasper Daniel to hide the fact that everything he learned about whiskey came from a Black man, or whether it simply happened that way because of the times, the era of ignorance around this history is over. And while outstanding women like Fawn Weaver and Victoria Butler (a descendant of Nathan Green) are doing their best to spread the word about Nathan Green through Uncle Nearest Whiskey, it is time for those of us in the spirits community to do our part and stop calling it the Lincoln County Process. We should call it the Nathan Green Process.

I distinctly remember a commercial that was on television while I was growing up that talked about the lore behind why the number seven appears on the Jack Daniel’s bottle. In that commercial, they talked about “when Jack made the Lincoln County Process,” which we now know is not true. To be fair, this was a commercial in the early 2000s, before The New York Times article came out. But I can fast forward to this year when I was in Tennessee, I was told that “Jasper Daniel saw Nathan Green as a mentor, a father figure.” Did he really though? There is no shortage of examples in the world of spirits that pay respect and homage to their ancestors or mentors by acknowledging them. Look at Tequila Fortaleza, Old Grand-Dad Bourbon, and Booker’s Bourbon, just to name a few. Jasper Daniel saw Green as a father figure, but never thought to share Green’s story when it came to how Daniel learned to make whiskey?

A counterpoint that will be made by some is that after 1865, Nathan Green was the highest-paid employee Jasper Daniel had and was the Head Distiller. The term Master Distiller was new in the late 1800s, but was anyone calling Nathan Green Master? On Jack Daniel’s website, Jasper is listed as Jack Daniel’s first Master Distiller, with that title dating from 1866 to 1911, even though Jasper had hired Nathan in 1865. If you do some link-clicking in their Our Story section, you can find out more about Nathan Green’s influence on Jasper Daniel, and there they mention the hiring and Nathan’s position. Keeping Nathan Green as an employee was a smart business decision. You don’t get rid of the golden goose while it’s still laying eggs.

When Jasper moved the distillery from Daniel Call’s farm to a few miles up the road in 1881, he gave Nathan Green the opportunity to continue working for him, but Nathan was old and didn’t want to go, so he sent his sons and grandsons with Jasper. You might think that if Nathan was a mentor, a father figure to Jasper Daniel, maybe after Nathan retired, after 15 years of being Jasper’s Head Distiller, Jasper would have made Nathan a partner, or his children partners in the business they helped build, or maybe even done a special barreling in honor of his mentor. But he didn’t. Jasper Daniel knew more about Nathan Green than any of us will ever know, and he kept that information to himself.

While in Tennessee, I was told that in Lincoln County the Green family have been local celebrities since the time of Nathan Green making everyone’s favorite whiskey. It turns out that there have been descendants of Nathan Green working at Jack Daniel’s throughout the distillery’s 150-plus years. How nice it must be for them to be employees at a company their ancestor helped create. It must be nice to be local celebrities when you know your family built a global empire.

It’s not always fun to look back at history. The morals of today don’t always translate to the past. As someone with a BA in history, I have seen historical information revised when new research discovers that what we thought before was incorrect. As someone who will soon be married to a woman with a degree in science and multiple scientific certifications, I know that new discoveries lead to revised scientific theories. There is no shame in saying, “We got it wrong before,” but there is some in saying, “Well, we’re not going to change it.” There is no question that Nathan “Nearest” Green was the creator of the Lincoln County Process. The thing that identifies Tennessee whiskey was created by one man, not a commission of distillers from Lincoln County or any type of collaborative effort. So instead of giving a county the reverence for making Tennessee whiskey what it is, say his name and call it the Nathan Green Process.