Green taught Daniel “sugar maple charcoal filtering” (known today as the Lincoln County Process), a universally accepted critical step in the making of Tennessee whiskey. He instructed the enslaved man to teach the young boy his distilling magic. Eventually, after much badgering from the young Daniel, Call introduced him to Green, who he called “the best whiskey maker that I know of,” according to a 1967 biography, Jack Daniel’s Legacy. While working as a laborer on Call’s farm, Daniel took an ardent interest in Call’s distillery. It was in this capacity that Green met young Jasper “Jack” Daniel and forged what would become an iconic partnership.Īround 1850, Daniel, a 7-year-old orphan looking for work and escape from a tough family life, found his way to the property of Dan Call, a Lynchburg preacher, grocer and distiller who had been previously credited with teaching Daniel how to distill whiskey. What is clear is that, by the mid-1800s, Green had gained renown as a skillful whiskey distiller in Lincoln County, Tennessee-so much so that his enslavers, the Landis & Green company, often rented Green out to area farms and plantations eager to partake of his whiskey-making skills. It’s not clear, for instance, if he was born into bondage or was enslaved later in life. Little is known about Green’s early years, beyond that he was born in Maryland in 1820. The old office beside the Jack Daniel's cave on the grounds of the Jack Daniel's distillery. An Enslaved Distiller Shares His Knowledge With a Young Orphan These skill sets earned premiums for their owners and made them attractive to buyers.” Overall, however, documentation of enslaved workers’ contributions to early American whiskey production remains sparse, as few enslavers saw fit to credit their achievements for posterity. According to American spirit writer Fred Minnick, author of Bourbon: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of An American Whiskey, brokers at auctions of enslaved people “would notate distiller-trained slaves, many of whom previously worked on Caribbean sugarcane plantations and contributed to the distillation of sugar’s byproduct, molasses, to create rum. Distillation was notoriously laborious and tedious work, and some plantation owners-including George Washington and Andrew Jackson-used enslaved workers to run their distilleries. Researchers are discovering that the role enslaved people played in America’s early whiskey-making went beyond manual labor like gathering grain and building barrels.
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