Nearest Green Distillery

Uncle Nearest is the Shelbyville, Tennessee distillery built around one of the most consequential historical recovery projects in American whiskey: the formal recognition, in 2016, of Nathan "Nearest" Green as the first known African-American master distiller in the United States. Green was an enslaved distiller in Lincoln County, Tennessee who taught a young Jasper Newton "Jack" Daniel the Lincoln County Process — the sugar-maple-charcoal filtration step that distinguishes Tennessee whiskey from bourbon as a legal category. Jack Daniel's own founding mythology has always acknowledged Green's role; Uncle Nearest is the brand that took that acknowledgment, scaled it into a fully owned distillery operation, and built it into the fastest-growing American whiskey brand of the modern era.

Founder Fawn Weaver, an author and entrepreneur, launched the brand in 2017 after spending years researching Nearest Green's history and meeting with Green's direct descendants. Weaver structured the company so that Green's descendants are formally involved in the business — Victoria Eady Butler (Green's great-great-granddaughter) serves as Master Blender, the first African-American woman to hold a master-blender title at a Tennessee whiskey distillery. The company is the largest African-American-owned spirits brand in the United States and one of the few craft Tennessee whiskey operations to scale to national distribution within five years of founding.

The Nearest Green Distillery itself opened in September 2019 on a 270-acre ranch in Shelbyville, Tennessee — Bedford County, roughly an hour southeast of Nashville. A May 2023 acquisition added 109 acres, bringing the campus to roughly 458 acres of distilling, aging, event space, and visitor program. By 2021 the distillery was the seventh most-visited distillery in the world, and Uncle Nearest had become the fastest-growing whiskey brand in the U.S.

The product range covers Uncle Nearest 1856 Premium Aged Whiskey (the flagship, named for the year Green is believed to have begun distilling commercially), Uncle Nearest 1884 Small Batch Whiskey, Master Blend Edition, and the limited Single Barrel Rye programs. In 2024 the company launched the separate Nearest Green Tennessee Whiskey brand, an additional product line specifically dedicated to Green's name independent of the Uncle Nearest brand architecture. The Shelbyville visitor experience is one of the most ambitious in Tennessee craft whiskey — tours, tastings, a full restaurant program, and event space that hosts industry conferences and private gatherings on a working-distillery campus that's still expanding.