00:00The man behind one of America's most famous whiskeys was once enslaved and nearly erased from history.
00:07His name was Nathan Nearest Green, an enslaved man in Lynchburg, Tennessee, during the mid-1800s.
00:15Green worked on the farm of Dan Call, a Lutheran minister who also ran a small whiskey distillery.
00:22There, a young boy named Jasper Newton, Jack, Daniel, learned the craft from him.
00:28Nearest Green was the master distiller, known for using a charcoal filtering method from West African tradition, a process later called the Lincoln County Process.
00:39It gave the whiskey its famously smooth taste.
00:42When slavery ended, Jack Daniel hired Green as the first head distiller at his new distillery, officially founded in 1866, now recognized as America's oldest registered distillery.
00:55Yet for more than a century, Green's role was left out of official histories, his name missing from company records and tours.
01:04In recent years, historians uncovered the truth, and Jack Daniel A. S. publicly honored Green as the first master distiller of the brand.
01:14Today, a new whiskey company, Uncle Nearest, carries his name and legacy.
01:19The man who began life enslaved ended up shaping an American empire, one recipe and one forgotten credit at a time.
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