Jack Daniel’s Embraces a Hidden Ingredient: Help From a Slave:

A lil bit of history here and perhaps some overdue credit.
As anyone who knows me, know I like my rum, especially dark rum, will down beers, love some hot sake in the winter but whiskey?? yes i'll have some if nothing else is around and wine good or bad is for dinner dates I wanna impress , now on to the whiskey and the most recognizable of them all Jack Daniels, there is not a man in nations that drink who do not know J.D.,
well the below is a little of J.D's history and a man finally getting some long overdue public love for his contribution from the company.

In a photo in Jack Daniel’s old office, Daniel, with mustache and white hat, is shown at his distillery in Tennessee in the late 1800s. The man to his right could be a son of Nearis Green, a slave who helped teach Daniel how to make whiskey.

LYNCHBURG, Tenn. — Every year, about 275,000 people tour the Jack Daniel’s distillery here, and as they stroll through its brick buildings nestled in a tree-shaded hollow, they hear a story like this: Sometime in the 1850s, when Daniel was a boy, he went to work for a preacher, grocer and distiller named Dan Call. The preacher was a busy man, and when he saw promise in young Jack, he taught him how to run his whiskey still — and the rest is history. This year is the 150th anniversary of Jack Daniel’s, and the distillery, home to one of the world’s best-selling whiskeys, is using the occasion to tell a different, more complicated tale. Daniel, the company now says, didn’t learn distilling from Dan Call, but from a man named Nearis Green — one of Call’s slaves. This version of the story was never a secret, but it is one that the distillery has only recently begun to embrace, tentatively, in some of its tours, and in a social media and marketing campaign this summer. “It’s taken something like the anniversary for us to start to talk about ourselves,” said Nelson Eddy, Jack Daniel’s in-house historian. Frontier history is a gauzy and unreliable pursuit, and Nearis Green’s story — built on oral history and the thinnest of archival trails — may never be definitively proved. Still, the decision to tell it resonates far beyond this small city. For years, the prevailing history of American whiskey has been framed as a lily-white affair, centered on German and Scots-Irish settlers who distilled their surplus grains into whiskey and sent it to far-off markets, eventually creating a $2.9 billion industry and a product equally beloved by Kentucky colonels and Brooklyn hipsters. Left out of that account were men like Nearis Green. Slavery and whiskey, far from being two separate strands of Southern history, were inextricably entwined. Enslaved men not only made up the bulk of the distilling labor force, but they often played crucial skilled roles in the whiskey-making process. In the same way that white cookbook authors often appropriated recipes from their black cooks, white distillery owners took credit for the whiskey.
mobile.nytimes.com...

So the next time you are out or have friends over, lift a shot glass and give homage to old Nearis Green, on a side note would be niiice if they wrote the Nearis family a big fat check or some stocks..dontcha think??//

a reply to: Spider879

The Native American Indians invented fire water aka whiskey.

originally posted by: SpecialSauce
a reply to: Spider879

The Native American Indians invented fire water aka whiskey.

Are you playing with your life here, don't let ma boy big Irish Mike hear you say that, even in jest..

a reply to: Spider879

Corn, which is the grain used to make whiskey, originated in Mexico. 500 years ago the Irish didn't even have corn.

a reply to: SpecialSauce

Didn't they call corn " Maize" .....and for the record , I do like jack Daniels .

So what, JD is made from bio-tech corn. I suppose it would be then.

P

originally posted by: SpecialSauce
a reply to: Spider879

The Native American Indians invented fire water aka whiskey.

No , thats what we called it. You been watching too many old Westerns.

originally posted by: SpecialSauce
a reply to: Spider879

Corn, which is the grain used to make whiskey, originated in Mexico. 500 years ago the Irish didn't even have corn.

But the process more than likely ended up as Beer rather than whiskey which is a distillation process.

Ah it must be the part that made me throw up half my body when i was a stupid 16 yr old.

a reply to: Spider879

My story I learned in elementary school, but I like your story more about how slave life was like one big frat party and all the Africans are invited. Sure, slaves had lots of party supplies, that's why they were all dying (literally) to get here. Obviously what I was taught in elementary school about slavery was wrong and their story that implies African slaves sat around taste testing whiskey, perfecting their recipes for the next boat party was right.

a reply to: [post=20915939]SpecialSauce[/post

Corn isn't the only grain used to make whiskey, nor is it the first.

a reply to: Arizonaguy

The mash for Jack Daniel's is made from corn, rye, and malted barley, and is distilled in copper stills. It is then filtered through 10-foot (3.0 m) stacks of sugar maple charcoal. The company refers to this filtering step as "mellowing".

originally posted by: SpecialSauce
a reply to: Spider879

My story I learned in elementary school, but I like your story more about how slave life was like one big frat party and all the Africans are invited. Sure, slaves had lots of party supplies, that's why they were all dying (literally) to get here. Obviously what I was taught in elementary school about slavery was wrong and their story that implies African slaves sat around taste testing whiskey, perfecting their recipes for the next boat party was right.

??? what gave you the impression that a slave's life was one big frat party,certainly nothing in my comment nor the article linked above.

a reply to: SpecialSauce

None of that means that Native Americans invented whiskey

I don't really like Jack Daniels.

Is Jim Beam ok?

originally posted by: Arizonaguy
a reply to: [post=20915939]SpecialSauce[/post

Corn isn't the only grain used to make whiskey, nor is it the first.

But it does make the best whiskey.

Nice post that.
I didn't realise JD was a real person.
How cool to see a photo of him!

originally posted by: Phage
I don't really like Jack Daniels.

Is Jim Beam ok?

Get yourself a bottle of Knob Creek...then get back to me.

a reply to: Phage


Cant argue with that one.

a reply to: Arizonaguy

The good thing about JB is that you can say, "Beam me up!"