Fawn Weaver founded Uncle Nearest to honor the formerly enslaved master distiller who taught Jack Daniel the secret to making great whiskey. Seven years later, she owns the most successful Black-owned liquor empire, worth $1.1 billion, with ambitious plans for the future. Including real estate, Weaver’s 40% stake makes her worth $480 million, landing her at No. 68 on Forbes’ Richest Self-Made Women list.
Weaver wasn’t a Jack Daniel’s drinker, but she knew there were countless former slaves whose stories, like Green’s, had been erased from history. As Green was no longer part of parent company Brown-Forman’s official history of Jack Daniel’s, Weaver sought to rectify that.
The first Uncle Nearest whiskey—named 1856 for the year it is believed Nearest Green perfected charcoal filtration—debuted in 2017 and went on to win the first of more than 1,000 awards for the brand. Today, there are seven Uncle Nearest releases—bourbons and ryes all produced under the direction of Victoria Eady Butler, Green’s great-great-granddaughter.
Read the full story on Forbes:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2024/05/28/fawn-weaver-interview-uncle-nearest-whiskey-unicorn/
0:00 Intro
1:21 From Rebellious Kid to Entrepreneur
2:40 Leaving Home at 15
3:32 Finding Purpose
4:52 The Story of Uncle Nearest Green
7:25 Fitting the Pieces Together
9:31 The Power of Charcoal Filtration
10:04 “I Should Have Failed”
12:49 Setting Up the Next Generation
14:03 Beating the Odds
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Weaver wasn’t a Jack Daniel’s drinker, but she knew there were countless former slaves whose stories, like Green’s, had been erased from history. As Green was no longer part of parent company Brown-Forman’s official history of Jack Daniel’s, Weaver sought to rectify that.
The first Uncle Nearest whiskey—named 1856 for the year it is believed Nearest Green perfected charcoal filtration—debuted in 2017 and went on to win the first of more than 1,000 awards for the brand. Today, there are seven Uncle Nearest releases—bourbons and ryes all produced under the direction of Victoria Eady Butler, Green’s great-great-granddaughter.
Read the full story on Forbes:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2024/05/28/fawn-weaver-interview-uncle-nearest-whiskey-unicorn/
0:00 Intro
1:21 From Rebellious Kid to Entrepreneur
2:40 Leaving Home at 15
3:32 Finding Purpose
4:52 The Story of Uncle Nearest Green
7:25 Fitting the Pieces Together
9:31 The Power of Charcoal Filtration
10:04 “I Should Have Failed”
12:49 Setting Up the Next Generation
14:03 Beating the Odds
Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1
Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:
https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript
Stay Connected
Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com
Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes
More From Forbes: http://forbes.com
Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00 People ask me all the time, what do I want my legacy to be?
00:04 I don't care.
00:09 [music]
00:24 If three generations from now they don't remember Fawn Weaver lived, I don't care.
00:31 And that's the interesting thing because I'm so passionate about cementing the legacy of Nearest Green,
00:37 but I don't actually care about people remembering me.
00:41 Maybe that's why I'm the steward of this story,
00:46 that I was chosen to be this generation's baton holder of this story
00:51 and building this brand to pass it to the next generation,
00:54 is because I don't think about myself in the process at all.
00:59 [music]
01:21 [music]
01:23 As a kid, I don't know that I would say I was entrepreneurial.
01:27 I would say that people would have called me rebellious as they did,
01:31 and I think most entrepreneurs would have been called rebellious as their kids,
01:35 so maybe it means the same thing in childhood.
01:38 If someone called our house, we would have to pick up the phone and say,
01:41 "It's a great day at the Wilson house. How may I help you?"
01:44 Well, what do you do if it's not a great day?
01:46 And so I was that child that was like, "I'm not going to say it's a great day.
01:50 I'm not having a great day."
01:52 And so there was just a nonstop battle with myself and my parents,
01:59 and at the age of 15, they had a new baby girl,
02:03 and they wanted to have an opportunity to raise her
02:06 without there being a negative influence in the house.
02:11 So they sat me down, and it was a sort of shape up or ship out type of conversation.
02:18 It was very much, "So listen, we want to have the opportunity to raise her
02:22 without you negatively impacting her, and so you have two choices.
02:27 Either you do what we are now telling you to do as your parents in this household,
02:33 or you have to leave." I think I was there another hour.
02:36 My mom says she remembers me leaving out with a backpack and a lunch pail.
02:40 When I left home at 15, I dropped out of high school not too long after,
02:45 and so I found myself at a place called My Friend's Place,
02:48 and it's for young people.
02:51 And then the only place that had a bed for me was Children of the Night.
02:55 When I turned 18, I could no longer be at Children of the Night,
02:59 so they moved me to Covenant House.
03:02 And so at Covenant House, every day you go out, you go out with your resume,
03:05 you go out and you look for a job. It's a requirement.
03:07 You either have to go to school or you have to go out and look for a job.
03:10 I went out the very first day, and I came back,
03:13 and we have these campfire things that you would do,
03:16 and everyone around the campfire was lamenting about how hard it is to find a job,
03:20 and they went out and they put out this and that and this and that.
03:23 And I sat there silent because I went out and came back with four jobs.
03:27 And I sat there and I was like, "Okay, I'm different."
03:35 Beginning my first business at 18,
03:39 I started with two clients both paying me, I think, $5,000 a month.
03:43 I thought I was really rich.
03:47 But then you learn that your top line and your bottom line
03:51 don't mirror one another if you hire a whole bunch of people.
03:55 And I think I had between part-time and full-time, like 10 people working with me,
03:59 and I only had two accounts.
04:01 And so it was very quickly before that ended up getting pared down to just me, right,
04:07 which is what most PR firms are when they're beginning.
04:10 So now I'm finding myself on couches again,
04:14 and at the age of 20, decided to try to take my life.
04:20 They had to pump charcoal through my nostrils,
04:22 and I will never forget the feeling of it going through cartilage
04:25 in order to pull out all of the pills that I took and the alcohol.
04:30 I remember sitting there and listening to the doctors talk around me,
04:33 and I remember laying there and going, "I have got to be here for a reason
04:38 because I've now tried to take myself out twice and have been unsuccessful both times."
04:43 And so literally laying there in that hospital bed,
04:46 I committed myself to figuring out why am I here on Earth.
04:50 Back in June of 2016, on the cover of The New York Times International Edition,
04:59 I saw this photo of this black man sitting to the right of Jack Daniel.
05:06 I wasn't a Jack Daniel drinker.
05:08 I had no idea who this black man was,
05:11 but Jack Daniel is one of the most ubiquitous brands around the world,
05:17 and so I knew what Jack looked like.
05:19 And the headline said, "Jack Daniels Embraces a Secret Ingredient--Help from a Slave."
05:25 But then when I began to dive into the story, something else began to be peeled back.
05:33 That photo, taken around 1904, that photo was cropped.
05:38 I got the original photo.
05:40 That black man isn't just to the right of Jack Daniel.
05:44 That black man was centered.
05:47 [♪♪♪]
05:50 So even though we don't have a photo of Nearest Green,
06:00 the person who he's seated the center position to is Nearest's son, George Green.
06:05 Nearest Green was not only the teacher and mentor of a young Jack Daniel,
06:10 he was the first master distiller for Jack Daniel Distillery,
06:15 yet Jack Daniel Distillery's original distillery number was distillery number 7.
06:21 Nearest Green is the only known master distiller to ever operate at distillery number 7.
06:27 I thought, if we can prove this, this changes everything,
06:32 because for African Americans for so long,
06:36 the way that we have seen ourselves or the way that we've been portrayed
06:40 is that these enslaved people came in and they were uneducated.
06:44 That's not true.
06:46 They were educated in their own country, in their own language.
06:50 And so for my 40th birthday, I decided I wanted to go to Lynchburg, Tennessee.
06:54 I want to see if what I think is true, which at the time is completely opposite
06:59 of everything that was in social media, everything that was in the press at that time,
07:03 was Jack is a slave owner, he stole the recipe, he hid the slave,
07:07 they've tried to hide this for the last 150, 160 years,
07:11 but I had a completely different theory.
07:14 This is a story of love, honor, and respect,
07:17 and it's an ally who wanted to make sure America could not wipe his friend away,
07:22 his mentor away, this insignificant person away.
07:25 [music]
07:28 One of the first people that we meet in the library
07:31 when I'm sitting there across from my husband doing research
07:34 is the second-eldest living descendant of Jack Daniel,
07:38 who offers to help, who literally pulls out her cell phone
07:42 and gives me the name and number of Nearest Green's descendant
07:45 who had been doing genealogy research for 30 years.
07:49 And then she said, "Hey, you know that book that you read called Jack Daniel's Legacy?
07:53 It's his biography written in 1967, height of the Civil Rights era.
07:57 And you have this white reporter from Alabama comes up,
08:00 interviews all of the people who knew Jack best,
08:05 and they include Nearest and his boys more time than Jack's own family.
08:11 In 1967, if you didn't want to credit a black man,
08:14 you just left him out of the book. You left him out of the story."
08:18 I shared this with Jack's descendant, and she's like, "Yes, we all grew up together.
08:24 The story that's out there is not the true story."
08:29 And so in that book, a lot of it takes place on this farm,
08:33 this 313-acre farm right in the hills above Lynchburg, Tennessee.
08:38 And she says to me, "Hey, you know that farm? It's for sale."
08:42 At that time, I thought this could be a book, this could be a movie.
08:47 Within a week, we had made an offer and had been accepted on that property.
08:53 And now all of a sudden we're going, "Well, what are we going to do with this?"
08:58 The realtor who took us is a descendant of Jack Daniel
09:02 who took us to see the house.
09:04 Turns out she had been in the family business her whole life.
09:06 She had retired after 31 years as the head of whiskey operations for Jack Daniel.
09:11 And she says, "Hey, I know you're going to do a book and you're going to do a movie,
09:14 but if you ever decide to put his name on a bottle,
09:17 I'll come out of retirement to make sure you get it right."
09:21 The serendipity of everything that was happening,
09:25 the only thing I could do was literally look to the heavens and go,
09:28 "All right, Jack and Nearest, what are y'all doing up there?"
09:32 What helped me to find my purpose or allowed me to live so that I could live in my purpose
09:42 is the same reason we are talking about Nearest Green's legacy today.
09:47 Because the only difference between Kentucky bourbon and Tennessee whiskey
09:51 is what Nearest Green taught, charcoal filtration.
09:55 Truly it was the same charcoal being utilized to purify my body
10:00 after a second attempt at my life.
10:04 When we began this, we knew that there had never been an African American,
10:11 a black American to succeed in founding and leading a spirit company
10:17 in the history of American spirits.
10:19 Now mind you, American spirits have been in our country for over 400 years
10:22 and never once was there a black American that had ever succeeded.
10:27 We have a lot more money these days and so our buying power is strong.
10:32 And as our buying power has gone up, we've become the face of all these brands,
10:36 but we didn't own it.
10:38 And so the question was, "Why?"
10:42 And I didn't have that answer, but what I knew is this industry wasn't set up for me to succeed.
10:47 So every time someone would give me advice, I would completely disregard it and do the opposite.
10:53 So everyone told me, "You should start in one state, build over the next four years or so
10:59 in that one state, and then try to pick up the states that are adjoining it."
11:05 I went to my chief business officer and I said,
11:07 "I want to be in all 50 states by the end of the first two years."
11:09 Why? Because there's a reason that strategy has failed us.
11:14 And even investors that I had brought in were like, "Fawn, why would you invest so much
11:19 in a distillery when none of these other bourbon brands are spending that kind of money,
11:24 put all that money into marketing?"
11:26 And I looked at it and said, "The home place for Uncle Nearest, Nearest Green Distillery,
11:29 is going to become the best marketing tool that we had."
11:33 So I announced, "We're going to spend $50 million on building out a distillery."
11:38 We weren't even two years old.
11:40 People were like, "This woman is crazy. Legitimately, this woman is crazy.
11:44 She has no idea what she's doing. She's going to fail."
11:47 And quite frankly, if you look at the moves I was making, I should have failed.
11:53 But they were the right moves.
11:56 And so we were able to transition very quickly.
12:00 Every single time an obstacle had come our way because we owned the land,
12:05 which meant we truly owned the brand.
12:08 And so many of the bourbon companies that have come before us that sold,
12:12 they didn't sell because those founders wanted to.
12:15 They sold because they had to, because they ran out of enough money to be able to lay down enough bourbon.
12:21 And for us, we began investing in assets so early, bourbon goes up.
12:26 So if I put it in at $750 in the barrel, and I can sell it a few years later at $1,600, guess what?
12:34 I can find investors to invest in that. I can find banks to invest in that.
12:39 Because that's real property. This land is real property.
12:43 These buildings that we have built, real property.
12:46 Having a Black-owned company pass to the next generation, we've not done that.
13:02 Every generation of Black Americans have started from scratch.
13:07 Every single one.
13:09 And now we have the opportunity to set the next generation up to not have to start from scratch.
13:15 Diageo, Bacardi, Brown-Forman, LVMH, every single spirit conglomerate in this country,
13:23 90%, if not more, of the volume of alcohol sales, all come from these spirit conglomerates,
13:30 all founded by white men, all still chaired by white men, led by.
13:37 And so having the opportunity to build a spirit conglomerate, the very first ever,
13:43 to be built by a person who was not a white male, that can't happen with just Uncle Nearest.
13:49 That has to be whiskey, there has to be cognac, there has to be tequila, there has to be vodka.
13:56 And so Uncle Nearest is one pillar in this house that will pass to the next generation.
14:02 This industry has an over 99% failure rate for new brands that launch.
14:09 I'm one of the 1% to succeed.
14:12 It would have been so easy to sell it for a billion dollars and just go, "I'm just going to rest."
14:20 But to know that my purpose is so much greater, and that no matter how hard it was,
14:26 there wasn't a price that they could buy this company for, and that I've stood my ground,
14:32 even when people were like, "She has to have a number. She has to have a number."
14:36 They've thrown every number at me and gotten the same response.
14:39 No. That's what I'm most proud of.
14:43 [Music]
15:09 [BLANK_AUDIO]