Before I started the Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey Company, white males represented 30% of this country's population and 100% of the available whiskeys100%. The world has only learned of Nathan 'Nearest' Green, the first known African American master distiller in the world, in recent years.
But to the people of Lynchburg, Tenn., his contributions to American whiskey were no secret. His family passed down the story of his mentorship and friendship with famed Tennessee whiskey maker Jack Daniel for generations.
Nearest couldn't read or write and left behind no personal correspondence or journals; beyond a few county records and family anecdotes, there is very little to help us understand who he was as a person or how he saw his world.
For decades, scholars have been trying to piece together African Americans' many unacknowledged contributions to U.S. foodwaysa difficult task considering that, for three centuries, records of Black people in America were erased, lost, or never collected in the first place.
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