On Monday, we announced that Uncle Nearest whiskey will be sponsoring recipes in our newsletter each Thursday. Ahead of announcing the partnership, we spoke to founder Fawn Weaver and she shared our love and respect for storytelling. In her case, that storytelling is sharing the life and legacy of Nathan “Nearest” Green, a former slave who taught Jack Daniel of whiskey fame how to distill. Here’s what she had to say about one of the most important forgotten figures in American whiskey history.

Unpretentious Palate: Why is the story of Uncle Nearest so important to whiskey and a history of whiskey in this country?
Fawn Weaver: It’s twofold. On one side, it’s so important because African-Americans have been a part of the building of this country from almost day one and have received very little recognition for anything achieved before this last generation. You’d be hard pressed to find very many accomplishments of African-Americans as it relates to business prior to that time. We have an American brand that is one of the most known around the world, that we were able to say there wasn’t just an African-American at the beginning of this, but he played an instrumental part and role. And it was that legacy of excellence that allowed for this brand to become what it became.

I think it’s important not just for our industry, it’s important for every industry. We’re just the first ones to dig into someone and to be able to prove it. But I believe that every single American industry has similar stories.

That’s one part of it. The other part of it is people, I think, in this country forget that you can’t just undo slavery overnight because African-Americans have more opportunity these days. I think that people forget the origins and the fact that the families were brought here. Number one, millions died in The Middle Passage. Far more died than actually arrived on shores here in America, and of those who arrived here, in order to ensure that Africans would not be able to revolt and to make sure that they would remain property, they separated wives and husbands, mothers from their children, fathers from their children and their wives. And they moved them to places where they couldn’t find one another. And then you have people that spoke a completely different language who arrive here and everyone refuses to teach them English. And so they don’t know how to read. They don’t know how to write. They have been torn from their families. They have no idea what state they are in, what area they’re in. There is no way to go find them.

I love America. I am so grateful I was born here. The opportunities that I have been able to create in this country, I don’t believe I’d have been able to create anywhere else in the world outside of maybe London. But the reality is, is even with that, it’s a little like an adopted child. An adopted child can be loved from their adoptive mother, adoptive father. They could have the best adoptive parents in the world and literally get more than they could have ever wanted in life from their adoptive mother and father. But when that child reaches 18 years old, the likelihood they are going to search for their own parents is high, not because they don’t love their adoptive parents and not because they don’t appreciate and respect what their adoptive parents have done. It’s that there is a part of them that is missing. There is a void that cannot be filled. Well, welcome to the world of every African-American in this country. There is a void that will never be filled because we’re always going to have a longing for something that we may never know, something we may never be able to touch or to reach. All of our family trees, for the most part, stop at our grandparents. We don’t know what’s beyond that point.

For those who don’t know that they come from a legacy of excellence, a legacy of entrepreneurs, a legacy of creators that were not allowed to patent, but they were brilliant, and they’re trying to create that from scratch now, knowing people like Nearest Green existed is hugely important.

UP: How hard was it for you to find information about Nearest? Are you still finding new details about him?
FW: I definitely haven’t uncovered everything because I still don’t know definitively when Nearest was born or where he was born. We believe it was around 1820 in Maryland. I can’t confirm how he got here. I can’t confirm who he learned distilling from to begin with. Was it another enslaved person?

Was it someone from Scotland? From Ireland? I don’t know any of that. I also do not know where he and his wife are buried, which drives me absolutely insane. We think we may know, because there is a tombstone that doesn’t have a name on it. It’s a very large tombstone, but it doesn’t have a name on it. However, almost all of Nearest’s children and grandchildren are buried nearby or around that tombstone. So we can look at that and say, that’s Nearest. But that could be anybody. We don’t know.

And I think that there is so much that you learn about a person based on where they were buried and who they were buried next to. Nearest’s wife, I have almost no information on her. She literally shows up in a census as his wife with eleven kids and disappears, not meaning like she left the marriage, but meaning outside of those two censuses, there’s zero information on her, even connected to her own family roots. There’s nothing. I’ve spoken to her own family and they can’t find anything either. And they have their own family genealogists and they can’t figure out where she came from, who she belonged to. They just know, based on her last name and location of where she was, where she originated. They know that she was a part of the family, but they don’t know anything beyond that.

And so there’s so much that we still do not know.

But what I can say is what we do know, a lot of that comes from the fact that Jack and Jack’s nephew, who took over the distillery, and that’s Lem Motlow, and then Lem’s four boys who took over the distillery and his other boy who ran the bank that Jack founded because they made sure to credit Nearest Green for his work and then to credit Nearest’s sons for their work. And they made sure to credit the enslaved people coming in as being those who brought the Lincoln County Process here because they went on record in the press. And in Jack’s biography it’s stating that very clearly, I had something to go off of. I think one of the biggest challenges with trying to uncover this for all of the other brands in whiskey and American whiskey is that those founders did not feel it important, I suppose, to actually name the African-Americans who were doing the work. You will see them in pictures so you know they were there, but nobody at those at those distilleries seemed to be able to name any of them. And so I am really, really fortunate that the one story that has come to the forefront is the one that I’ve brought to the forefront. And it was a lot easier for me to know exactly where to start looking in terms of turning over rocks, because Jack and his family left a trail that would pretty much ensure that even if Nearest’s name was at some point wiped from the history books or a story was whitewashed, there would be no choice but for Nearest’s name to reappear at some point. And that’s precisely what happened in 2017.

UP: You mentioned that a lot of founders didn’t feel the need to recognize the people behind their success. How many distillery owners do you think had African-Americans quietly making their whiskey? 
FW: All of them. If you see the kind of work that went into distilling at that time, it was hot. Your whole face and body is covered in coal. You walk in one color, you leave black. I don’t care what color you were when you went into there. And it is hard work. There is absolutely, positively no way those white people were doing it and they had enslaved people to do it for them.

So we know that they had enslaved people. Any of the distillery owners that had enslaved people and I’ve not done the research to figure out how many that is, not only do I not have time, I don’t have the interest. But the reality is, is any of those people who had enslaved people, the likelihood that some of those enslaved people were distillers and those who were making the barrels, charring the barrels, rolling the barrels. It’s high. It’s a very high likelihood.

UP: How much pressure did you feel coming out with a brand named after Uncle Nearest to make sure that the whiskey was living up to his legacy?
FW: Massive pressure. It was imperative because when you set out on a mission to cement the legacy of someone, that means that hundreds of years from now that person’s bottle has to still be on shelves. The only way you do that is you have to make sure that in the current generation, you’re setting up for future generations to continue building upon a brand. Well, if you’ve got a great story and crap whiskey, good luck with that. It was an enormous responsibility for us, that’s why we brought together one of the most incredible teams. We knew we had an incredible story, an incredible brand story and namesake legacy, but we had to make sure that the juice in the bottle lived up to it. And I think we’ve done well.

UP: How do you grow Uncle Nearest from here?
FW: We have so much opportunity. I think people get really fixated with with adding SKUs or new products instead of focusing on the SKUs they have. We already have three SKUs and all three of them sell lights out. So I don’t feel any pressure whatsoever to come out with another SKU. I think that the opportunity on just what we have is more than enough. I’ve had a particular product in R&D for over three years, I brought in even some of my favorite distillers in the industry outside of our own company to play with it in their own R&D labs because we haven’t been able to perfect it. And I still haven’t been able to perfect it. So if it ever gets perfected, that’ll be our fourth SKU. But for right now, I am very happy with just the three SKUs that we have and have no intention of doing any special finishes, any flavors, any nothing. If Nearest wasn’t making it when he was alive, I’m not interested in making it now.

UP: In your research, are there any anecdotes about Nearest that hint at his personality?
FW: Well, I think the fact that he was a well played fiddler and singer and people would literally come and he would play the fiddle and everyone would sit around. And I think that lets us know in and of itself that he had a more upbeat nature, because the fiddle is not something you play if you’re down. That would be the blues. The fiddle is always going to be something that gets people’s toes tapping and gets people smiling. And so to know that not only was he a skilled fiddle player, but then he passed that on to at least one of his grandsons. I think that says a little bit about his personality. I think the confidence of his children and his grandchildren in such a way that I would have never, ever, ever had any thought or idea that they were the children and grandchildren of a formerly enslaved man. I think that means that he passed down to them some sort of innate confidence. It could be a quiet confidence, but nevertheless a confidence. And so I think that the confidence, the upbeat nature of the fact that he played the fiddle when he wasn’t working — those things to me begin to shape who he was as a human being.

UP: Why is it so important to have a compelling story when you’re creating a new brand?
FW: The American whiskey business is a heritage business, meaning it is a story-driven industry. You literally cannot put out an American whiskey and have it do well with out some type of heritage story that is associated with it. It’s why so many of them make it up. So I think what’s unique here is that we have a story in which we’ve got all the proof to back it up. And we didn’t have to make up anything. We didn’t have to — we didn’t have to add anything, exaggerate anything. We were able to tell the story exactly as it was. I think one of the reasons the brand is doing so incredibly well is that authenticity has really reached people. If you come into American whiskey without a story, that’s the quickest way to fail.

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