Fresh Take: Fawn Weaver’s $1.1 Billion Whiskey Playbook

Have you tried Uncle Nearest whiskey? I’m thrilled to share my latest magazine feature, all about this incredibly fast-growing business and its founder and CEO Fawn Weaver. After visiting Uncle Nearest’s distillery in Shelbyville, Tennessee, I began to fully grasp what Weaver has been building over the past seven years, and wow was I blown away.

Weaver’s entrepreneurial celebration of Nearest Green—the formerly enslaved first master distiller of Jack Daniel’s who Weaver calls “the best whiskey maker the world never knew”— has been a runaway success since it launched in 2017. Uncle Nearest is the fastest-growing whiskey in U.S. history—its sales have tripled since 2022—and the best-selling Black-founded and -led spirit of all time.

I go deep, explaining how Weaver has refined the playbook for how to build an independent spirits startup. She has shunned venture capital and private equity funding in favor of lots of smaller investments, structuring deals to maintain control of the company and ownership of the land.

“I don’t believe you own the brand unless you own the land. It’s special to us. But it’s also incredibly special to Black people,” Weaver told me. “Historically, we’ve done a lot of renting but not a lot of owning. A lot of being an ambassador and building other people’s stuff, but not a whole lot of building our own.”

Despite Weaver’s ban on institutional capital, investment bankers constantly reach out. Forbes conservatively estimates her business is worth $1.1 billion, and Weaver’s stake is valued at $470 million, which lands her on Forbes’ annual list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women for the first time.

Many spirits brands reach a level of scale and “just kind of peter out,” Goldman Sachs’ Jason Coppersmith, a top food and beverage banker, explained to me: “What Fawn and team have been able to do is bucking the trend,” says Coppersmith. “Uncle Nearest is a brand that’s getting a lot of attention for the exact right reasons.”

But Weaver says she will never sell. Her vision is bigger than that.

“I’ve stood my ground even when people were saying, ‘She has to have a number,’” Weaver explained. “They’ve thrown every number at me and gotten the same response—no. That’s what I’m most proud of.”

I can’t wait for you to dig into this inspiring story.

— Chloe Sorvino, Staff Writer

Order my book, Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and the Fight for the Future of Meat, out now from Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books.

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Chloe Sorvino leads coverage of food and agriculture as a staff writer on the enterprise team at Forbes. Her book, Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and the Fight for the Future of Meat, published on December 6, 2022, with Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books. Her nearly nine years of reporting at Forbes has brought her to In-N-Out Burger’s secret test kitchen, drought-ridden farms in California’s Central Valley, burnt-out national forests logged by a timber billionaire, a century-old slaughterhouse in Omaha and even a chocolate croissant factory designed like a medieval castle in northern France.