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Jack Daniel is a household name in the whiskey industry — and throughout the world. But did you know the name Nearest Green?
Without him, there might not be Jack Daniel’s as we know it.
Green is the man who taught Daniel how to distill back in the 1800s — before he was freed from slavery.
Now, one D.C. woman who is inspired by Green’s story has decided it’s time to carry on his legacy more than a century later by becoming a master distiller who is Black.
Tracie Franklin recently left her job in D.C. and now travels back and forth between home and rural Tennessee where she’s learning to make whiskey and learning some American history.
“I realized that there was a whole world in whiskey,” Franklin said.
Franklin went from blogging about the liquor to working behind the scenes of the industry’s biggest brands. But to understand how she got here, we have to go back to the 1800s.
