Unicorn status: Uncle Nearest Tennessee whiskey's unlikely rise to $1.1 billion distillery

What connected Fawn Weaver to the man who would be at the center of her life's work was good fortune ― the kismet kind that leads you down the right path if you'll let it.

But what began as a quest for the full story became a tangible fortune.

Weaver co-founded Nearest Green Distillery in 2019 in Shelbyville, Tennessee. It's a 458-acre state-of-the-art temple to Tennessee whiskey and the formerly enslaved man who invented its defining style. And it's recently been valued at $1.1 billion.

Weaver, a serial entrepreneur and best-selling author, is the first Black American woman to build a billion-dollar company from the ground-up outside of sports and entertainment.

The Nearest Green Distillery is a unicorn, a startup worth more than $1 billion.

But Weaver does not dwell on that.

"It's exciting to people I think, just because people have this attachment to a billion, this unicorn status ― it's just a thing," Weaver told the Tennessean. "But for me, that unicorn status is so ground-floor."

The improbable rise of Nearest Green Distillery and the history of its namesake, a Black man in the South who helped Jack Daniel distill his famous whiskey, unfurls in page-turning style in Weaver's new book, "Love and Whiskey."

The book, launched June 18, has already been met with critical acclaim and quickly reached best-selling status via the New York Times and USA Today.

Weaver learned of Green's story from a 2016 New York Times piece, "Jack Daniel’s Embraces a Hidden Ingredient: Help From a Slave," printed on the front page of Singapore's version of the Times. If she weren't traveling, she might have missed it at first; in the U.S., the story was in the food section.

Jack Daniel's Distilling Co. had come forward with the information that Daniel, the distillery's namesake, didn’t learn to make whiskey from a preacher named Dan Call, as had previously been company lore. Daniel learned how to charcoal filter and refine whiskey from Green, formerly one of Call’s slaves.

It was an explosive story. But its bones were sparser than Weaver would have preferred. She knew it could fill a whole book, and she knew a story is richer the more you immerse yourself in it.

'Going after the open doors and the lit paths'

She flew to Lynchburg, the tiny Tennessee town where Jack Daniel launched one of the most globally recognized liquor brands more than 150 years ago.

There, she assembled a team of more than 30 researchers and spoke with more than 100 of Nearest Green's descendants to uncover more. In the meantime, she would stumble upon the building blocks of what would eventually become the top-selling Black-founded and owned spirit brand of all time.

With her husband and business partner Keith, she toured the Dan Call Farm, where Daniel and Green first made whiskey together. It had been for sale for 20 years, and Brown-Forman, the parent company of Jack Daniel's Distillery, had passed up the chance to buy it. The Weavers committed to buy it within days.

They later learned that it was the original site of the first Jack Daniel's distillery, not Cave Hollow where the modern distillery now sits. A historical marker erected on the property last year calls Nearest Green "the first known African American master distiller of Tennessee Whiskey."

Nevertheless, no one had trademarked Nearest Green's name, not even Brown-Forman. Weaver jumped at the chance.

It wasn't long after that that she gathered a large group of Green's descendants at a Nashville church. She shared with them what she had learned. Then she asked how Green's family would most like to see him honored.

One man raised his hand.

"We think Nearest deserves his own bottle," he said.

Everything began to fall into place.

"I'm constantly going after the open doors and the lit paths, and I just kind of go with it," Weaver said.

'Everyone thought I was crazy'

The Nearest Green Distillery opened its doors to the public in 2019, selling its flagship Uncle Nearest 1856 Premium Whiskey. Weaver, a spirits world outsider, had launched the fastest-growing whiskey brand in U.S. history.

And she did it by bucking conventional wisdom, such as sticking with one major distributor. She has 17 distributors that formed a healthy competitive ecosystem.

It's an unheard-of model she said, quoting a line from the movie "Dirty Dancing" — "Nobody puts baby in the corner."

"Literally everything that people told me to do who were industry people, I would listen to it and then I would do the opposite," she said.

Weaver's unconventional approach had industry insiders doubting her staying power.

"Everyone thought I was crazy, off my rocker, that I had no idea what I was doing," she said.

They thought she wouldn't last three years, she said. But three years after her distillery opened to the public, the company announced sales of $100 million. It's now home to the world’s longest bar and is worth $1.1 billion.

But Weaver's chief focus is ensuring her business is so stable that it can survive as an infallible multigenerational business, fortified with guardrails that protect it from being dismantled by the whims of any one person.

"To make sure that there's not a single person in the next generation that can kill all the work the prior generation did," she said. "For me, that's my big thing, but you have to be a certain size for that to work."

Even though Lynchburg is a remarkable example of how equality prevailed more than 150 years ago in a small Southern American town, Weaver said she never could have imagined she'd plant the roots of her legacy business there.

"No," she said, "This is crazy."

But entrepreneurship is not for quitters, nor for overthinkers, she said.

"I'm like God, if this isn't for me, then close that door," she said. "A lot of people stop themselves from doing things. They go into analysis paralysis, and I don't really have that."