Lincoln County Process

1715 - d.c. 1816) and that it traveled with the family from New Jersey, to Virginia, and then Pennsylvania where Mary's daughter Tabitha Jacocks Pearson (1734 - 1811) taught the recipe to Billy.

Billy took the family recipe to South Carolina and on August 7, 1791 he was kicked out of the Padgett's Creek Baptist Church for making whiskey.

It is assumed that Billy farmed the land he purchased and continued to make whiskey until he sold his recipe along with the sugar maple charcoal filtration method to Eaton.

Recently it has been claimed that Nathan “Nearest” Green, the former slave, teacher of Jack Daniel and his eventual master distiller "was the one who decided to cut down sugar maple trees, create charcoal from it and filter his unaged whiskey [through it] before barreling.

"[6] Proponents of Green as the inventor of the Lincoln County Process propose that he learned the practice of using charcoal to filter water from his ancestors and adapted it to whiskey.

Some producers claim that according to a 1941 Internal Revenue Service ruling issued at the request of Jack Daniel Distillery, the Lincoln County Process is what distinguishes "Tennessee whiskey" from "bourbon".

[16]) The term "Tennessee whiskey" does not actually have a legal definition in the U.S. Federal regulations that define the Standards of Identity for Distilled Spirits.