Daily Briefing: Tennessee whiskey Nearest Green's incredible growth

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Tennessee whiskey Nearest Green's incredible growth

The improbable rise of Nearest Green Distillery and the history of its namesake, a Black man in the South who helped Jack Daniel distill his famous whiskey, unfurls in page-turning style in Fawn Weaver's new book, "Love and Whiskey."

Weaver co-founded Nearest Green Distillery in 2019 in Shelbyville, Tennessee. It's a 458-acre state-of-the-art temple to Tennessee whiskey and the formerly enslaved man who invented its defining style. And it's recently been valued at $1.1 billion.

Weaver learned of Green's story from a 2016 New York Times piece, "Jack Daniel’s Embraces a Hidden Ingredient: Help From a Slave." Jack Daniel's Distilling Co. had come forward with the information that Daniel, the distillery's namesake, didn’t learn to make whiskey from a preacher named Dan Call, as had previously been company lore. Daniel learned how to charcoal filter and refine whiskey from Green, formerly one of Call’s slaves.

It was an explosive story. But its bones were sparser than Weaver would have preferred. She knew it could fill a whole book, and she knew a story is richer the more you immerse yourself in it.

Read the full story .

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This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Daily Briefing: Tennessee whiskey Nearest Green's incredible growth