Bourbon in Washington, Oh My!

 

Kash Patel's personalized
bottle of Woodford Reserve.

The Atlantic isn’t letting up on Kash Patel. Today, Sarah Fitzpatrick, the reporter responsible for the magazine's April 17th exposé, dropped a new story headlined, “Kash Patel’s Personalized Bourbon Stash.” It seems the FBI Director is using personalized 750ml bottles of Woodford Reserve as a gift for folks he wants to impress, a sort of 90° proof calling card.

This is only a story because it’s Kash Patel, a relentless self-promotor who likes to spell it “KA$H,” including on his personalized bottles. A spokesperson for Brown-Forman confirmed that “consumers who purchase Woodford Reserve occasionally have images and messages engraved on the bottle,” adding the disclaimer that, “these engravings occur after the point of purchase.”

An FBI spokesperson confirmed what Patel is doing. “The bottles in question are part of a tradition in the FBI that started well over a decade ago, long before Director Patel arrived. Senior Bureau officials have long exchanged commemorative items in formal gift settings consistent with ethics rules. Director Patel has followed all applicable ethical guidelines and pays for any personal gift himself.”

He did not say if those previous commemorative items contained whiskey.

The FBI, of course, was a product of Prohibition enforcement but, overall, the pearl clutching about this revelation is laughable. Although it’s not the way it used to be in Washington, alcohol has fueled politics since both were invented. Back when legislators remained in the capital for the entire legislative session and landlines were the only way to communicate “back home,” socializing with colleagues, lobbyists, and others from the government and its periphery was a way of life. Alcohol, mostly whiskey, was part of it. This certainly extended to gift-giving.

What was true in Washington was just as true in state capitals.

One bourbon brand still sold today was created by a politician as a gift for, as in Patel’s case, anyone he wanted to impress. His name was Charles Farnsley. He was a politician who served in the Kentucky House of Representatives (1936-1940), as mayor of Louisville (1948-1953), and in the U. S. House of Representatives (1965-66).

The Farnsleys were old Louisville money. Charles was the nephew of Alex Farnsley, an investor who backed “Pappy” Van Winkle and Arthur Stitzel in the formation of Stitzel-Weller during Prohibition. Between his stint in the state legislature and his election as mayor, Charles Farnsley was a lobbyist for local bourbon makers, including Uncle Alex’s Stitzel-Weller.

A statue of Mayor Farnsey on Main Street in Louisville

In 1936, while a member of the Kentucky House, Charles created a bourbon brand called Rebel Yell, a unabashed tribute to the Confederacy. Stitzel-Weller made it for him. Initially, he just gave bottles out as gifts, which he continued to do in his capacity as an industry lobbyist. The whiskey became so popular that Stitzel-Weller began to distribute it commercially, first locally, then throughout the South. 

Charles Farnsley was a contradiction. Although he pined for the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy, as mayor he desegregated Louisville’s libraries and public swimming pools. In Congress he enthusiastically supported the 1965 Voting Rights Act and other Great Society legislation.

Rebel Yell was briefly discontinued a couple times but has mostly been sold ever since. Over the years everything associated with the Confederacy has been removed, including half of the name. Today it’s just “Rebel,” an MGP/Luxco product. It never was a big brand and still isn’t. 

Suntory’s Booker’s Bourbon started in much the same way, as a gift that salespeople for what was then Jim Beam Brands gave to customers and other friends of the company. For many years Brown-Forman had a gift brand they called President’s Choice used for the same purpose. Virtually every liquor company has done something similar, and most have personalization options for consumers.

Bourbon Distilleries, Ranked by Capacity, 2026

 

One of six column stills at the Jack
Daniel's Distillery in Lynchburg, TN.

Blogger gives me a rudimentary idea of how many people look at this blog and what, specifically, they look at.

Typically, the two most popular posts are old ones. The most recent post is usually third.

The perennial winners? "Bourbon Distilleries, Ranked by Capacity" from September of 2017 and "The Truth About Tito's and All Vodka" from October of that same year.

I don't know why the vodka post is so popular. Maybe it's because the truth about vodka isn't widely reported. I'm glad people read it, but I don't have anything to add. I did update it, at the end of the post, after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

I know why the other one, about distillery capacity, is so popular. Vendome has a link to it on their website. It deserves an update. Although not a lot has changed, what has changed is big. (It will be up to Vendome if they want to change the link.)

I should mention that the data I'm reporting is not "industry data," it's mine, based on a database I've maintained for years that tracks one simple metric, capacity as determined by the size of the distillery's beer still(s). It's an imperfect metric but it has the advantage of allowing apples-to-apples comparisons.

A distillery can produce less than its beer still's capacity, and everybody does, especially now, but it can't produce more.

You can go back to that 2017 post for more about the database and how I use it.

Brown-Forman's Jack Daniel's Distillery remains #1, although I don't believe it has gotten any bigger since 2017. That's one of Brown-Forman's problems right now. Jack Daniel's is huge but it's a mature brand here in its home market, without a lot of room to grow. It has huge potential outside the U.S., so the recent change in tariffs on whiskey is welcome. 

In addition to the Lynchburg distillery, which only makes Jack Daniel's products, Brown-Forman has three other U.S. whiskey distilleries, all in Kentucky.

Sazerac's Buffalo Trace Distillery has moved up two places into second, since bringing its second 84" beer still online. 

That moves Heaven Hill's Bernheim Distillery in Louisville to #3 and Suntory's Booker Noe Distillery in Boston, Kentucky to #4. Brown-Forman's second-largest distillery, in the Louisville suburb of Shively, remains at #5.

Number six is no longer a tie, since Suntory has taken the 72" column at Clermont out of the running. Sazerac's Barton 1792 in Bardstown has sole possession of #6.

This is a good place to mention that those four companies, Brown-Forman, Sazerac, Suntory, and Heaven Hill (the Big 4) continue to dominate the American whiskey space, as they have for decades. 

The next two are unchanged in terms of rank. Four Roses in Lawrenceburg, now owned by Gallo, is #7 and Suntory's Maker's Mark in Loretto is #8. Heaven Hill's new Bardstown distillery is the new #9, moving Campari's Wild Turkey in Lawrenceburg to #10 in a tie with Middle West Spirits in Columbus, Ohio. Bardstown Bourbon Company, now owned by Lofted Spirits, is #11. Jackson Purchase, in Hickman, is #12. The other Lofted Spirits distillery, Owensboro's Green River, is #13. The Lawrenceburg, Indiana distillery sometimes known as Ross & Squibb, owned by MGP, is tied at #14 with Whiskey House of Kentucky in Bowling Green. 

There is a tie at #15 between two Diageo distilleries, George Dickel in Tullahoma, Tennessee and Bulleit in Shelbyville, Kentucky. That would have been a three-way tie except Diageo's newest distillery, in Loretto, is currently off-line.

At #16 we have Campari's Wilderness Trail Distillery in Danville. Tennessee Distilling Group, in Columbia, Tennessee, is #17.

We'll end it there. As things change, I'll let you know.

It's interesting to note that Gallo, new to the bourbon game, comes in at #7 with the highest-ranking distillery not owned by one of the Big 4. Also now looking like players are Campari and Lofted Spirits, each with two listed distilleries. Lofted is now the biggest contract distiller, supplanting MGP.

I'll conclude with a reminder that this ranking is based on capacity, not production. In this new environment, that's going to vary widely. I've removed from the list distilleries that have announced they won't distill in 2026, but how much the remainder will distill in 2026 is up-for-grabs, since it seems like everybody has more than enough already in barrels.

Telling Whiskey History in Tell City (Part 4)

 

Some of Park & Tilford's fine perfumes.

When David Schulte bought Old Overholt in the middle of Prohibition, he didn’t want the Pennsylvania distillery. That was worthless. He wanted its 35,000 barrels of aging whiskey along with the license that allowed him to sell that whiskey as medicine. Schulte paid $4.5M for Overholt and sold it to the Wathen brothers’ American Medicinal Spirits Company (AMS) for $7.7M. AMS was the biggest seller of medicinal whiskey and would go on to become the biggest component of National Distillers.

Then Schulte went after another Prohibition loophole, fragrances. As Prohibition Commissioner Roy Haynes helpfully pointed out, alcohol had “hundreds of uses and only one is outlawed.” Prohibition led, almost overnight, to a tripling of industrial alcohol production. Suddenly, Park and Tilford was a major perfume manufacturer. Millions of gallons of industrial alcohol were diverted and illegally transformed into ‘whiskey,’ ‘gin,’ and other concoctions based on flavoring neutral spirit.

Schulte's Park and Tilford was not the only company that did this, allegedly. Schulte managed to stay on the right side of the law and transitioned into legal whiskey-making after Repeal. He also remained a major perfume manufacturer. 

In 1938, Schulte opened an office in Louisville and began to buy distilleries. He acquired Louisville’s Bonnie Brothers, Krogman in Tell City, the Woodford County Distillery in Midway, Kentucky; the Hamburger Distillery in Brownsville, Pennsylvania; and the Owings Mills Distillery in Gwyn Falls, Maryland. They all operated under the Park and Tilford banner.

Park and Tilford kept Krogman going for about 20 years. People in the industry usually referred to it as Park and Tilford or Tell City, but it was always Krogman to locals. 

Several Beam family members worked at Schulte’s distilleries. Roy Beam, one of Joe Beam's seven distiller sons, was the distiller responsible for all Park and Tilford plants. He was based at Bonnie Brothers in Louisville. 

Roy hired his brother Otis to run Tell City. Roy’s son, Charles Lloyd ‘Charlie’ Beam, also worked at Krogman. Charlie would go on to work for Seagram’s, where he created the Eagle Rare bourbon brand. He finished his Seagram’s career as distiller at Four Roses in Lawrenceburg. In 2010 he was inducted (posthumously) into the Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame.

David Schulte died in 1949, leaving Park and Tilford in the hands of his two sons. They sold it to Schenley, then the country’s largest whiskey company, in 1954. It took a few more years for Schenley to decide Krogman was excess capacity. The property was acquired by the city government and is today part of Tell City’s sewage treatment plant. 

Krogman shut down for good in the 1960s. Tell City's other claim to fame, the Tell City Furniture Company, closed in 2012. Antique shops in Tell City and vicinity sell stoneware jugs and other Krogman collectibles, as well as vintage Tell City furniture.

Today Tell City (pop. 7,272) is the seat of Perry County (pop. 19,170). It celebrates Swiss heritage with an annual festival in August. Visitors can enjoy its scenic riverfront park and historic downtown. Nearby is the Hoosier National Forest.

(This is Part 4 and the conclusion. If you'd like to start with Part 1, go here.)

Does the Uncle Nearest Whiskey Brand Have a Future?

The Nearest Green Distillery in Shelbyville, Tennessee.

There are many acts still to play out in the psychodrama the Uncle Nearest case has become, but I've been thinking about the endgame.

As a business, Uncle Nearest is a basket case. The value of the company's tangible assets is a fraction of its indebtedness. Whatever an asset sale brings in will go to the bank, which leaves nothing for other debtors, company principals, or investors.

The wildcard is the company's intangible asset, the Uncle Nearest brand. Its value is between nothing and infinity. The receiver is supposed to protect and preserve the value of all assets but especially that one, which is why there is a receivership and not a bankruptcy. 

Despite the receivership, the various expressions of Uncle Nearest Whiskey are still available for sale in liquor stores throughout the nation. As big as this story has been for those of us who follow these things, it is likely most Uncle Nearest customers are unaware of the turmoil, or only vaguely aware of it. Sales are off, as they are throughout the distilled spirits industry, but they have not cratered.

Therefore, there is an expectation that however this sorts out, and regardless of who winds up owning it, the production and sale of Uncle Nearest Whiskey will continue. Getting accurate sales figures is something the receiver has struggled with. Like everything else, the company's books are a mess, but a good estimate is about 150,000 cases a year. Traditionally, a brand isn't considered 'major' unless it sells at least one million cases a year, but most producers consider a brand 'viable' if it sells at least 20,000 cases, so 150,000 is substantial and, being still a young brand, it has growth potential. 

For comparison purposes, Jack Daniel's sells about 9M cases annually. Smirnoff vodka sells about 24M.

But at 150,000 cases, Uncle Nearest's business is too valuable to not keep going, right?

Maybe not.

Brands do die and disappear. Some are remembered; most aren't. Sunny Brook was one of the biggest bourbon brands pre-Prohibition. It's no longer sold and only serious history geeks have ever heard of it.

Does the Uncle Nearest brand have what it takes to continue and thrive under different ownership and leadership? That may well depend on deposed CEO Fawn Weaver. Can you imagine her going to work for Diageo or Suntory as a brand ambassador? Can the brand continue if she's not involved? What if she's hostile to the new owners? That's a definite possibility since she has already made statements about the brand being "stolen" from her.

Those are questions any potential buyer of the Uncle Nearest trademark will have to answer.

Consider Diageo's Bulleit Frontier Whiskey. It survived the controversy surrounding father and daughter brand ambassadors Tom and Hollis Bulleit with barely a ripple. Maybe that's because Diageo immediately cut all ties to the family. 'Bulleit' is now just a name on the bottle. The Bulleit family no longer has a role. It's not a perfect comparison because both Bulleits were already Diageo employees. They had no ownership stake.

All this got me thinking about Uncle Nearest himself, Nathan 'Nearest' Green, the formerly enslaved man who "taught Jack Daniel how to make whiskey."

A lot of the Uncle Nearest story is puffery. There's nothing wrong with that. Most brand stories are replete with puffery. Believe it or not, "puffery" is a legal term. It refers to "exaggerated or hyperbolic statements that are so clearly promotional and subjective that no ordinary person would take them as literal facts."

I like the Uncle Nearest story and hope the brand survives, but Nathan Green is significant only because Jack Daniel is significant. It is likely every American whiskey company with mid-19th century roots has an Uncle Nearest somewhere in its story. "Uncle" and "aunt" were permissible ways to respectfully refer to a Black man or woman, if you were white, at a time when referring to a Black man as "mister" could get you killed. 

In part, Nearest Green is important precisely because we know about him, so he stands in for the thousands of anonymous Black workers, enslaved or emancipated, who ran stills and made whiskey for white owners. 

We have few records that name the enslaved men and women who worked in distilleries. It's likely that when slavery was legal in all the English colonies, most distilleries used that labor force. The first major commercial distilled spirits industry in Colonial America was New England rum, made from molasses, a byproduct of sugar refining. It was shipped from Great Britain's Caribbean colonies to its colonies in New England. Virtually all of the labor in the Caribbean sugar colonies was enslaved. It's likely that carried over to the New England distilleries. Massachusetts didn't abolish slavery until 1783. 

Enslaved men and women who had special skills were often rented out by their owners. A skilled distiller would have been much in demand and would fetch a high price. As much as we romanticize it today, distilling in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries was hard, hot, and dangerous. That's exactly the kind of work enslaved people did, the hard, hot, and dangerous kind.

This reality has long been a problem for whiskey marketers, many of whom use history (real or imagined) in their brand stories. Early Times Bourbon had a famous sign that hung in bars and liquor stores depicting a frontier distillery. They produced thousands of them, which you can find on eBay. It showed several workers doing various tasks. Every face was black. In later years, they produced the same design with white faces. In the final iteration the distillery scene was the same except with no people of any color. No workers were shown.

"But what about Uncle Nearest inventing the Lincoln County Process of charcoal filtering?" Sorry but, no. He didn't. That's part of the puffery. Charcoal filtering using maple wood charcoal was common practice in Tennessee and elsewhere before Nathan Green and Jack Daniel were even born.

"But doesn't it count for something that he was involved in starting a whiskey that became the most popular whiskey in the world?" Okay, sure, but Jack Daniel's didn't become the brand it is today because of Nathan Green, Jack Daniel, or Lem Motlow. It became hugely successful through the efforts of the company that bought it from the Motlow family in 1956, Brown-Forman.

At the time of that sale, Jack Daniel's was successful and growing, but it wasn't #1. That came much, much later.

What is unique is that the Green and Daniel/Motlow families had an ongoing relationship, into the present day, and although Green's story wasn't widely known outside of the Lynchburg community until 2016, it was always known there.

Most Uncle Nearest customers, like most whiskey consumers, don't know a lot about the brands they buy or the companies that produce them, and what they know or think they know may not be accurate. Most don't know, for example, that although there is a still at the Nearest Green Distillery in Shelbyville, no whiskey is made there. It's a real still that could make whiskey, but they never finished installing it. 

Most of the whiskey sold under the Uncle Nearest label is made at Tennessee Distilling Group (TDG), a contract distiller located about 40 miles west of Shelbyville in Columbia. TDG would love to keep making it, but they probably aren't willing or able to market and distribute it themselves, even if they obtained the rights. 

But maybe I'm wrong. Just last month, TDG bought an Irish whiskey distillery, Waterford, out of receivership.

So, if the Uncle Nearest brand survives and thrives, it won't be because of those legacies, it will be because a base of consumers have adopted the brand. If that adoption can be nurtured and expanded, then the brand has a future. If its stewards, whoever they turn out to be, succeed at that, then it has a chance. If they fail, it doesn't.

Telling Whiskey History in Tell City (Part 3)

 

Krogman made many different products post-Prohibition.

So well regarded was the Krogman name that, after Prohibition, a group of Tell City businesspeople decided to revive the distillery and its brands. Tell City had affection for the Krogman and Voelke families and felt Will and Claudina had been unfortunate victims of an even more unfortunate failed public policy. Moreover, the investors believed the Krogman name could still sell whiskey. They formed a corporation and issued stock. Ed Schultz was president; William Gerber was vice president. His son, Will Junior, was secretary and plant manager. The Krogman family was not involved. 

The distiller was John Striewe, Krogman’s pre-Prohibition distiller. The distillery was projected to consume 500 bushels of grain daily. They announced willingness to buy 2,000 bushels of apples per day in the fall for brandy. 

Because of the robbery and fire, there wasn’t much left of the plant in 1933. It took $130,000 to rebuild and get distilling going in December of 1934. Another $40,000 was spent the next year to build a new 15,000-barrel maturation warehouse. They produced 55 barrels of whiskey a day and used 520 bushels of grain to do it. The brandy business never quite materialized. In the end they put in about $300,000 (about $6.5M today).

In fall of 1935, Krogman released its first bourbons. Obviously, they were very young. Lincoln Trail was 8 months old and 100° proof, Brushy Fork was 8 months old and 93° proof, Duchess was 6 months old and 90° proof, Deer Creek was 4 months old and 93° proof, and Millstone was 4 months old and 90° proof. Those last two, Deer Creek and Millstone, were aged in half barrels (24 gallons) in heated warehouses, an experiment in rapid aging. 

Selling whiskey at such young ages was not unusual in the immediate aftermath of Prohibition. People wanted something to drink, were happy to get it, and the distillers needed income. The nuances of aging and proof in the portfolio suggest a customer base that understood the significance of each. These were inexpensive whiskeys aimed at savvy but cost-conscious consumers. They could have drunk vodka or gin, but they preferred whiskey. Properly made four-month-old bourbon was still better than vodka, in the estimation of Kroman's customers.

Krogman distilled on-and-off for about three years. After that, selling the whiskey in its warehouses as it matured kept the company nominally in business until 1941, when it was sold to a national company. The Tell City News tried to put the best possible face on the local ownership’s failure. The sale, “will probably prove to be beneficial for the city of Tell City,” it opined. “The plant has not been running for several years and very little labor has been employed.” They reported that the new owners promised to operate the plant and “employ local labor as much as possible.” 

The journal could not, however, gloss over the fact that, “from the standpoint of investors who put up money to build and start this plant in Tell City, this move will not be so good for they will lose much of their original investment but from the standpoint of the city generally, there is little doubt but that it will be a benefit.”

Mostly, the local newspaper was just happy “our little plant” would be “in the hands of a reputable concern.”

Not so fast.

Joseph Park and John Mason Tilford opened a small grocery store in New York City in 1840. They built it into a large, successful chain of stores that sold wine and liquor as well as groceries and tobacco products, especially cigars. Their sons succeeded them in the business. 

The loss of alcohol sales hit the company hard when Prohibition took effect; that left cigars as their big moneymaker. 

In 1923, Park and Tilford was sold to David A. Schulte, a competitor in the cigar trade. Cigars were still a huge business despite growing competition from cigarettes. Schulte considered Park and Tilford “the best retail merchandising name in the country.” He merged the two companies under the Park and Tilford brand and kept most of the existing organization in place. He even married the widow of the company’s treasurer. 

Park and Tilford became Schulte’s vehicle for acquisitions in medicinal alcohol and fragrances, two Prohibition loopholes he exploited. 

In 1925, Schulte bought Pennsylvania’s Old Overholt Distillery. The seller was U.S. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, who had been partners in the distillery with Henry Clay Frick. Best known as a steel industrialist, Frick happened to be Abraham Overholt’s grandson. Mellon was Frick’s banker and had owned the distillery outright since Frick’s death. He gave it one of the six medicinal whiskey licenses, but since the Treasury was responsible for Prohibition enforcement, it didn’t look good for the Secretary to own a distillery, even a legal one, so he sold it to Schulte.

Well, it looks like this is at least a four-parter. More to come.

Telling Whiskey History in Tell City (Part 2)

 

Krogman's jugs are a popular collectible in the Tell City area.

Will Krogman married Claudina Voelke, whose father owned Tell City's largest brewery. When Claudina’s parents died, the Krogmans moved into her family’s mansion on the grounds of the old brewery. Their elder daughter, Willie, was 21 but still living with them. Their Etta was just 13.

They tore down the brewery, landscaped the grounds, and renovated the house. It was heralded as “one of Tell City’s handsomest residences, on a site of commanding elevation.” 

In 1911, the year Will and Claudina moved into their renovated mansion, a Tell City man was feuding with his neighbors about some chickens. He shot and killed one of the neighbors, was convicted of murder, and sentenced to life in prison. His victim’s family claimed the murderer was drunk on Krogman’s Whiskey when he committed the crime. They sued Krogman for $10,000. 

After several tries, in an atmosphere of growing hostility to alcohol, the family found a jury willing to award them $7,000 (about $140,000 today). That award was set aside by a subsequent trial, where Krogman prevailed. The victim's family appealed that decision to the Appellate Court of Indiana, which also ruled in Krogman’s favor. The ordeal dragged on for seven years.

Then things got worse for Will Krogman. On the heels of the lawsuit’s resolution, Indiana Prohibition shuttered his distillery, two years before national Prohibition. Most of Will’s capital was tied up in his plant and the whiskey aging in his warehouses. Was all that now worthless? 

‘Medicinal sales’ were somewhere in the future, but the feds were dunning him for unpaid excise tax now. How did they expect him to pay his taxes if he couldn’t sell his whiskey? Will was desperate. He decided his whiskey should be liberated. He knew he could sell it if he could just get his hands on it. 

To that end, he got together four pals and planned a heist. The warehouse had been hit several times already, mostly by kids stealing a gallon or two. Will and his crew worked on their plan for a year. They would make it look like the previous, legitimate robberies, then torch the warehouse to conceal the crime. 

They got away with about 800 gallons. They had buyers ready and expected to net about $20,000. Everyone would get their cut and go their separate ways. That was the plan.

But the fire didn’t take. The Fire Chief could tell it was an inside job. The first people they caught took deals and ratted out everyone else. Eighteen individuals were arrested, including Will Krogman. They were tried together in federal court in Indianapolis. 

Coincidentally, 800 gallons worked out to 18 barrels of whiskey, one for each defendant. All pled guilty. Their sentences ranged from a few months in county to a year or more in the federal lock-up in Atlanta, where Al Capone, George Remus, and other Prohibition criminals did time. Will Krogman got two years in Atlanta and was fined $2,000.

At trial, one of Will’s confederates, a fellow from Chicago, testified that Will offered to ‘sell’ him whiskey for $12 a gallon, all he had to do was go get it. That was the caper. Will diagramed everything and assured the Chicagoan he could take the whiskey out of the warehouse and the Treasury agents guarding the place would not interfere. (They didn’t.) 

As Will directed, whiskey was siphoned from barrels into jugs, which were passed through a drainpipe to other “whiskey gangsters” outside, who loaded the jugs into cars, then onto boats on the Ohio River, to be transported to Evansville, the bigger town fifty miles downstream. About 15 gallons stayed behind in Tell City, hidden at a baseball park.

In addition to Will Krogman, several other upstanding citizens were convicted, including the manager of an Evansville hotel, the secretary of that city’s parks board, and two former sheriffs. 

After the trial, Will tried to run. He left Tell City but was caught in Louisville and hauled back to Indianapolis for sentencing.

When Will was released from Atlanta he was 61. He and Claudina traveled a bit, settling for a time near Brownsville, Texas, where they grew citrus fruit. Krogman’s conviction didn’t hurt his social standing in Tell City. Local journals continued to report the couple’s coming and going in the society columns. They returned to Tell City for good in 1930. He died two years later, while visiting Etta in Illinois. Claudina died in 1937, while visiting Willie in Ohio.

Although the Krogmans themselves were gone, Krogram's Distillery continued or, rather, returned after Prohibition. Next time, in Part 3, the revival and ultimate demise of Krogman's.

Telling Whiskey History in Tell City (Part 1)

The Krogman Distillery in Tell City, Indiana, post-Prohibition.

Matt Colglazier is Chief Merchandising Officer at Big Red Liquors, a chain of retail liquor stores with 103 locations throughout Indiana. 

If you know the name "Krogman's," it's probably from a side project Colglazier did in 2019, called Krogman's Old Master. Although the website is still there, the whiskey is long gone. Here's the story.

"Born in Tell City, Indiana, this pre-prohibition brand is back and better than ever! Two 90 proof expressions of bourbon and rye, along with the most unique single barrel offering in the country. Bottling nine different MGP mashbills as non-chill filtered, cask strength, single barrels, which are individually selected, and each given a unique nickname. Collect them all, and taste every recipe from one of the world’s premier whiskey distilleries. Hand-bottled in Bloomington, Indiana. No BS, just full disclosure barrel proof, single barrel all day long!"

An original bottle of Krogman's Old Master Bourbon.

It was an all-Indiana project. The MGP distillery, now sometimes known as Ross & Squibb, is in Lawrenceburg, on the Ohio River at the Ohio border, just west of Cincinnati. Bloomington, where it was bottled, is about 100 miles due west of Lawrenceburg. Tell City is on the Ohio River too, about 100 miles south of Bloomington. The Lawrenceburg to Tell City route is the hypotenuse of the triangle.

But there is more to the Tell City and Krogman's story. Much more.

In 1856, a group of German-speaking Swiss immigrants met in Cincinnati to organize the Swiss Colonization Society. They acquired 4,000 acres on the Ohio River between Louisville and Owensboro in Perry County, Indiana. They named it Tell City, after the mythological Swiss hero, William Tell. 

They considered sites in Kentucky and Missouri but rejected both because of slavery. “None of our colony would ever forget the sacred principles of Republicanism so far as to make use of such a privilege,” as one society member put it.

The plan was to quickly develop an industrial infrastructure, “organized more for the common benefit of the poorer class of our countrymen, which consists mostly of intelligent mechanics and farmers," according to official documents. It became a manufacturing center, mostly for furniture. Although the company that made them folded in 2011, solid maple Tell City chairs remain popular. 

There were breweries and distilleries in Tell City almost from the beginning but the biggest and most important one was August Krogman's. 

Not everyone in Tell City was Swiss. Krogman was from Holstein, in what was then the German Confederation, where he learned brewing and distilling. There had always been German immigrants in the Americas, but the trickle turned into a torrent after the unrest of 1848. Krogman came in 1855, at age 34. He worked at a brewery in Iowa before moving to southern Indiana.

Throughout that part of the state, coal seams are very close to the surface and easy to mine. Many farmers in the region also mined coal. Krogman was one of them and used those profits to start his distillery.

Like many, Krogman's distillery made bourbon whiskey but also apple and peach brandy. August ran the distillery successfully until his death in 1905 at the age of 84. His son, William ‘Will’ Krogman, took over and ran it until Prohibition. 

Will started out strong. He owned Tell City’s biggest distillery, and his father-in-law was the city’s biggest brewer. 

But Prohibition was in the wind and Will's problems began even before the drought, next time, in Part 2.

How Likely Is a Brown-Forman, Pernod Ricard Merger?

 

A rolling billboard for Old Forester and other Brown-Forman
brands at the company headquarters and distillery
on Dixie Highway in Louisville (1936).

Today Bloomberg and Reuters, two generally reliable news sources, reported that Brown-Forman and Pernod Ricard are in talks about a merger of some sort. The reports are based on anonymous sources and neither company has confirmed anything, but the story is being widely reported with headlines like this one from the Lexington Herald-Leader. "Reports: Kentucky whiskey company Brown-Forman, Pernod Ricard in merger talks."

This pops up whenever there is upheaval in the distilled spirits industry. On paper, Brown-Forman looks like a great acquisition. It has one superior brand and a couple of pretty good ones, primarily in the American whiskey space. It's a well-run company, profitable, and not overloaded with debt. 

Pernod Ricard is the world's #2 distilled spirits company after Diageo, with annual gross sales of $12.3B. It owns Absolut Vodka, Jameson Irish Whiskey, Chivas Regal Scotch, Martell Cognac, Havana Club Rum, and a bunch of others. Though well-endowed with Scotch and Irish whiskey, it is light on American whiskey, although it owns a few craft producers such as Kentucky's Jefferson's and Rabbit Hole, West Virginia's Smooth Ambler, and Fort Worth's Firestone & Robertson, which produces the TX Whiskey brand.

Usually when these Brown-Forman merger rumors appear the finger is pointed at Bacardi, sometimes Diageo. 

Is Brown-Forman in play? Probably not, inasmuch as these rumors have always fizzled in the past. Although publicly traded, Brown-Forman is still controlled by the Brown family. They're generally happy with things the way they are. It would be very hard, perhaps impossible, for a determined suitor to force a sale.

I've always heard that the Brown family doesn't like the Bacardi family, which is why that tie-up always falters. I don't know how they feel about the Ricard family.

An observation: When I made the "Made and Bottled in Kentucky" documentary, I mentioned in the script that Brown-Forman was then "a three-billion dollar company." If I remember correctly, that was their gross sales for the previous year. That was 30+ years ago. Brown-Forman's gross sales for 2024 were $5.32B. Considering inflation, the company may actually be smaller today. That may tell you more about the distilled spirits business than it does about one particular company.

By contrast, Brown-Forman's principal rival in the American whiskey space, Suntory, is much bigger than Jim Beam Brands was 30 years ago, but they have grown by acquisitions more so than by growing their core business. Brown-Forman has bought some brands over the years, but I don't think they've bought a rival company since the 1950s, when they bought Jack Daniel's. 

Booze is a good business but it's not AI. There's not a lot of potential for growth. The market generally dislikes diversification so that leaves acquisition as the only path to growth, and the liquor business seems to be hard on its #2. When Diageo passed Seagram's as #1 at the end of the 20th century, Seagram's went out of business.

One peculiarity of the American whiskey business is that the four largest distillers, who together make about seventy percent of America's whiskey, are all closely held. Some of Brown-Forman's stock is publicly traded. The other three, Suntory, Sazerac, and Heaven Hill, are entirely family owned. In all three cases, the principal shareholder is a man in his 80s. 

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Late today, after this posted, Brown-Forman confirmed that it is exploring "a merger of equals" with Pernod.

Pride Goeth Before the Fall

 

Fawn Weaver and company, startled by the Harold Washington
animatronic at the DuSable Museum in Chicago, June 25, 2024.

The Uncle Nearest saga began eight years to the day before the above picture was taken.

That was when Clay Risen revealed Nathan 'Nearest' Green's story to the world, or at least to readers of the New York Times, in an article headlined "Jack Daniel’s Embraces a Hidden Ingredient: Help From a Slave."

Fawn Weaver credits that article with inspiring her to create the Uncle Nearest whiskey brand. These days, she and the brand are in a heap of trouble.

Eight years is a good age for American straight whiskey. At least to my taste, eight to twelve years is the sweet spot for whiskey aged in new, charred oak, which bourbon and whiskeys like it must be.

But I digress.

To build a premium whiskey brand from nothing to approximately 150-thousand cases a year seems like a remarkable accomplishment, especially for someone with no previous industry experience and little more than a good story. The liquid, though perfectly fine for what it is, is not extraordinary. That's not why people buy it. It's the story or, I should say, stories, Green's but also Weaver's. 

They are inextricably linked.

From the beginning, I've been impressed by Weaver. She seemed to make all the right moves and experience nothing but success. Seeing her perform in person, during her 2024 book tour, just increased my estimation, even though by then I had heard troubling rumors that all in Tennessee was not as it appeared.

But, in person, Weaver absolutely owns the room. She's dazzling. She casts a spell and makes you want to believe. She held her own last night and two weeks ago on ABC's "Shark Tank" TV show. (Both episodes were recorded last summer, before the current troubles.) 

There have been many facts and counter-facts floating around. Weaver is all over social media but the receiver and the bank she owes $100M+ to only speak through their filings with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee, where Case No. 4:25-cv-38 is being adjudicated.

Let's focus on that $100M number, which is closer to $200M when you add the unsecured creditors. I have it on good authority that she raised a similar amount, about $200M, from investors. Suddenly, that 150-thousand cases per year after eight years doesn't seem so impressive, if they spent $400M to get there. For all intents and purposes, the company is broke. Like everything else, the value of its tangible assets is in dispute, but it's way south of $100M, let alone $400M.

Even more disputed is the value of its intangible assets, specifically the Uncle Nearest brand, which ranges from zero to infinity.

My previous post on this subject was a reaction to those who assume the whole thing was a scam from the beginning. If it was, it was a poor job, because that money appears to be gone and not in anybody's pocket. Judge Charles Atchley Jr., who is presiding over the case, used the "out over your skis" idiom at one point. Based on everything we know, that seems as good an explanation as any. 

Judge Atchley is expected to rule soon on Weaver's motion to end the receivership and the receiver's motion to add seven other Weaver businesses to the package.  

Weaver's latest gambit, filing bankruptcy for a company she no longer controls, which didn't last 48 hours, and also filing a defamation suit against the bank which, even though she is a Californian whose company is in Tennessee and the bank she's suing is in Kentucky, she filed in New York. It all just seems weird at this point, like she's grasping at straws. 

Self-confidence will only take you so far. 

Don't Judge Uncle Nearest Too Harshly

 

The Uncle Nearest Distillery in Shelbyville, Tennessee.

I'd like to take a moment to offer some perspective on the Uncle Nearest situation. This is especially for folks who jumped to the conclusion that it was a scam from jump.

FAT Brands is a global franchising company in the fast-casual, quick-service, casual dining, and polished casual dining segments. Some of their better-known brands are Fatburger, Johnny Rockets, Ponderosa and Bonanza. (Those last two are revivals of brands from the 60s.)

FAT is bankrupt and their debt is so big, even debtors who thought they were safe may be impacted.

According to Bloomberg, FAT has $1.4 billion in bonds supported by just $40 million in annual earnings. Like Hooters and T.G.I. Fridays before it, FAT pledged virtually all its earnings to a debt structure that became too much to bear.

It's not the same as Uncle Nearest, of course, but in both cases the scheme fell apart when the market for the company's products suddenly changed, and they didn't have enough wiggle room in their financing to adapt.

That doesn't change anything. I'm just saying many businesses are a house of cards in the sense that a sudden change beyond their control can bring it all crashing down.

America's True "Same as It Ever Was" Whiskey

 

E. H. Taylor was one of the prominent distillery
owners who lobbied on behalf of the Act.

Last month I posted “Whiskey’s Biggest Lie,” debunking the marketing practice of brands claiming ancient recipes and unchanged methods, implying that whiskey in the past surely was better. Since the industry began, distillers have claimed they did things “the old fashioned way,” whether they did or not.

The prevalence and persistence of such claims suggests there is an itch bourbon drinkers long to scratch, to taste whiskey their parents or grandparents would recognize. People scour liquor stores for dusties. They buy Prohibition-era bottles at auction. Some search for authenticity in moonshine, legal and illegal.

There are problems with all these approaches. Many dusties are glut-era bottlings. They represent what people were drinking then, but it wasn't typical. Many bourbon producers in the 1980s bottled whiskey that was much older than was customary for those brands, just to get rid of it. Those bottlings are representative of that relatively brief period but not, for example, of the periods immediately before or after it, and not of everything sold then. The biggest brands, such as Jim Beam and Jack Daniel’s, didn’t do this. They had not grievously over-produced, so they didn't have to do much correction. It was contract producers and smaller brands, some on their way to oblivion, that bore the brunt. (The same thing is happening now.) 

Even a decade or more after they were produced, a lot of those bottles were still out there. If you got your hands on them, they were very good and usually cheap. But bottling better whiskey didn’t save them and most whiskey that was so treated is now gone or priced stratospherically on the secondary. A. H. Hirsch Reserve is a similar story. It was aged that long because the owner didn't have a use for it. Some of those bottles are still out there but they cost a fortune.

Earlier bottlings, including those Prohibition-era pints, are also pricey. Much of the whiskey bottled during and immediately after Prohibition was mishandled or simply in wood way too long. A lot of it, maybe most of it, disappoints. Either way, it’s not representative of what your great-grandparents drank before the drought.

Moonshine, legal or illegal, has its own set of problems.

But there is one way to taste something made today in virtually the same way it was made more than a century ago. Its main parameters haven’t changed because they are dictated by federal law.

That, of course, is bottled-in-bond whiskey. The Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897 was proposed and supported by distillers such as E. H. Taylor and opposed by rectifiers. Taking advantage of the law was voluntary. The business between distillers and rectifiers could continue as it always had but now distillers had a way to ensure that their customers received what Taylor called "the genuine article." 

As an incentive to participate, the Act allowed distillers to defer payment of the Federal Excise Tax until whiskey was withdrawn from the bonded premises. To get the deferred taxation benefit and the privilege of labeling their whiskey “bonded” or “bottled-in-bond,” the distiller had to follow several rules having to do with how the whiskey was produced and sold. Those rules are still in effect today.

In a way, they codified practices already followed by many distillers, some of which differ from modern practice. Today, it is common for distillers to mix whiskeys of different ages, even whiskeys produced at different distilleries. There’s nothing wrong with that, many very good whiskeys are created that way, but it was less common 129 years ago when the Act was passed.

While bottled-in-bond whiskey isn’t necessarily better, it is different. The sort of blending that is typical today is something a bond can’t do. Everything in the bottle must come from a single distillery and it must have been distilled during a six-month period, either January-June (“Spring”) or July-December (“Fall”), in a single year. 

We have “small batch” and “single barrel” whiskeys. You can think of BIB as “single batch,” the "batch" being all the whiskey produced at that distillery during a six-month period.

The rule also says, “one distiller.” I’m not sure what a distillery is supposed to do if their distiller quits in April, but that’s the rule. Presumably, whiskey distilled from January first through the separation date would be one batch, whiskey distilled thereafter until June 30th would be another batch.

About the only change is that, in the old days, the batch had to be identified on the bottle, usually on a paper strip that “sealed” the bottle in the days before shrink wrap capsules. The distillation season and bottling season had to be noted, e.g., “Fall 2020, Spring 2025.”

That labeling requirement was eliminated in the 1980s but another labeling requirement remains. For BIB spirits, the federal license number of the distillery, known as its DSP number, must be shown on the label. 

All distilled spirits products must indicate on the label the city and state where the producer is located, but it can be any place of business. Typical today is the name of the producer, which can be an assumed business name (e.g., Evan Williams Distilling Company instead of Heaven Hill), followed by one or more cities where that producer does business. 

But that's not good enough for BIB. The number of the distilling DSP must be printed on the label. You'll have to look up the number to identify the distillery, but that's easily done on the internet. If the whiskey was aged or bottled at a different DSP, those numbers have to be there as well.

That requirement allows anyone with a DSP to buy BIB whiskey in bulk and bottle it under their own brand name so long as they disclose where it was distilled, aged and bottled. This is not common, but it is done. Sourced whiskey can be bonded if it meets all the requirements.

BIB whiskey cannot be bottled and sold until it is at least four years old. It can be older, but must all be the same age. If a BIB is labeled ten years old, every drop is ten years old, no more, no less. It also must be bottled at 100° proof (50% ABV), no more, no less.

As for consumer protection, the Act’s purpose was to guarantee the authenticity of whiskey so labeled. It was the first instance of the United States federal government offering a guarantee of this sort. It was the first federal “truth in advertising” legislation.

Back in the late 20th century, several major producers told me they considered dropping BIB. It was always voluntary and as the 21st century dawned, it seemed of little interest to consumers. Because it required deviation from normal procedures, there was no point doing it if it produced no benefit. At that point, few brands still offered a BIB expression. Not surprisingly, many were brands sold only in the South, some only in Kentucky. The best-selling bond nationally was Old Grand-Dad.

But then craft distilleries came along. Every craft distillery that wanted to make whiskey faced a dilemma, what to do for four or five years until that first batch of whiskey matured. They needed revenue and they needed to build a following. Some sold very young whiskey. Others sourced mature whiskey. Others made vodka, gin, rum, amaro, or liqueurs.

For many, the goal they set for themselves was to release a house-made bond. It was a standard they were proud to meet, and many considered that their "arrival." When they were able to offer their bond as a portfolio product, not a limited release, it often became the top of their line, maybe even their flagship.

When consumers responded, this revived interest in the bond segment among major producers. Evan Williams Bottled-in-Bond has been very successful for Heaven Hill. 

Brown Forman, founded in 1870, predates the Bottled in Bond Act and opposed it. Although their Old Forester Bourbon was a high quality, all whiskey product, it was blended using whiskey from three different Kentucky distilleries, none of which Brown-Forman owned. Pre-Prohibition, Brown-Forman was a non-distiller producer. Today their line includes a 100° proof expression that is not bottled-in-bond. Ironically, Old Forester 1897, which is bottled-in-bond, is one of their most popular offerings.

For a bonded bottling, barrel selection is crucial, similar to single barrel. Because blending options are so limited, there is nowhere to hide. Most producers blend to a standard, a literal in-the-bottle sample of exactly how the brand should taste. Quality control consists of trained tasters comparing that standard to each candidate batch. This is done for bonds too. It’s hard to imagine a whole season not producing enough good barrels for a bond release. A producer can always skip a season, I suppose, but I suspect they simply have to tolerate more deviation from the standard with a bond than they would with their non-bonded release.

So, people claiming an unchanged recipe for 250 years are puffing, but 129 years is a different story. Just look for the words "bonded" or "bottled-in-bond."

Keeping Up with the Pritzkers

 

An aging warehouse at Bardstown Bourbon Company.

Last Friday, a lawsuit was filed in Nelson County in which Sylvia E. Sanders accused Bardstown Bourbon Company (BBC), parent Lofted Spirits, Lofted CEO Mark Erwin, BBC president Peter Marino, Pritzker Private Capital (PPC) Investment Partners and PPC operating partner Christian Brickman of gender discrimination and retaliation. 

Sanders was VP of Human Resources at BBC from 2019 to 2024, when she was dismissed. She claims the company created a hostile work environment for female employees and others. She was fired after she reported “illegal, unethical, discriminatory and improper conduct” by the defendants to company management.

BBC says, “We believe these claims are without merit, and we intend to vigorously defend ourselves.”

In addition to Bardstown Bourbon Company, Lofted Spirits owns Green River Distillery in Owensboro.

I don't know Sanders or any of the principals at BBC except Master Distiller Steve Nally. I know people who know Sanders and think highly of her. Same with her lawyer, James Morris. They describe BBC as a "boy's club." Sanders' suit also accuses BBC of racism.

Erin Petrey, who is running for congress, went on Facebook to express her opinion and share her bad personal experience with BBC founder Peter Loftin. 

This reminds me of the Eboni Majors case, filed in 2022. A blender at Diageo's Bulleit Distillery in Bulleit County, Major alleged in her suit that she was subjected to persistent racial hostility, including pay discrepancies and demeaning treatment by co-workers. She was eventually pushed out of the company.

I can’t improve on the coverage of the BBC story provided by the Lexington Herald Leader. However, in its article, the Herald Leader mentioned that PPC "is owned by Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Anthony N. Pritzker." 

On Monday, Hyatt Hotels Executive Chairman Thomas ("Tom") Pritzker announced his resignation after documents released by the Department of Justice revealed his association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. 

So, it seems like a good time to sort out our Pritzkers. I live in Chicago, so J. B. Pritzker is my governor. I voted for him, twice.

The governor's grandfather, Abram Nicholas Pritzker, was born in 1896, a son of Ukrainian immigrants. His parents settled in Chicago. His father, Nicholas, initially worked as a pharmacist but studied law at DePaul University (as did I) and became a lawyer. Abram (“Abe”) became a lawyer too and joined his father’s firm, along with his brothers Jack and Harry, also lawyers. 

Abe had three sons: Jay, Robert, and Donald. It was Jay who founded the Hyatt Hotels chain, the main source of the family’s fortune. Each of the brothers had several children, many of whom are prominent in business, politics, entertainment, and philanthropy. They are almost all billionaires.

Jay’s children include Tom, the Hyatt executive implicated in the Epstein scandal. Jay's daughter Gigi is a successful film producer.

Robert’s kids are variously accomplished, but none were in the news this week.

That leaves Donald. His kids include Penny, who was Obama’s Secretary of Commerce in his second term. Her brothers are Anthony (“Tony”), who runs PPC, and Jay Robert, better known as J. B., governor of Illinois since 2019. 

In 2002, J. B. and Tony founded PPC, with Tony as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. PPC acquired Bardstown Bourbon Company in 2022 after the death of Loftin, who founded the distillery in 2014.

So, Tony and J. B. are brothers. Tom is their first cousin.

When he became governor, J. B. Pritzker put his assets into a blind trust. That means he makes money off those investments but has no role in decision making. He has nothing to do with management of BBC or any of the other companies owned by PPC. 

As for the BBC case, if the charges are even half true, it represents a serious management failure. You can't change people's prejudices, but you can keep them out of the workplace. You have to. That's not politics, it's just good business. You can't run a successful company if your employees don't feel respected and safe.

We'll be watching with interest.

This Week in Uncle Nearest News

 

The Uncle Nearest facility in Shelbyville, Tennessee.

My post last Friday, made in anticipation of the hearing in Knoxville federal court on Monday, received more than 10,000 views. For this blog, that's a lot. Many people are interested in this story. I will continue to follow it and may occasionally write about it, but there is much more thorough coverage out there. Here are some of the sources I use:

First, Uncle Nearest CEO Fawn Weaver, despite instructions from the court not to litigate the case in the media, continues to litigate the case in the media. Just use "Fawn Weaver" as your search term and you will be connected to all of the Fawn Weaver you can handle.

News outlets that have covered the story thoroughly include the Lexington Herald Leader and the Tennessean. Both require paid subscriptions but often their stories are available from aggregators such as MSN.com within a day or two of publication.

Two free news sites with in-depth coverage are the Moore County Observer and Shelbyville Now. Moore County is the home of Jack Daniel's. It is adjacent to Bedford County, whose seat is Shelbyville, where Uncle Nearest is located. Considering that these are small communities and these outlets mostly report on local government and high school sports, the depth and quality of their coverage has been remarkable. Because of Jack Daniel's and George Dickel, many people in those communities are sophisticated when it comes to the whiskey business. Add to that the splash Uncle Nearest made in its short time, in terms of local employment and generation of economic activity.

Finally, there is the Bourbon and Rye Club, a blog based in New Orleans, which illustrates its extensive coverage with witty AI-generated pictures of cats. 

Not much came out of Monday's hearing, in that the two questions before the court were simply kicked down the road a couple weeks. 

On Thursday evening, into Friday morning, Ms. Weaver posted three videos, each about three minutes long. I saw them on Facebook, but I believe they originated on Instagram. Everything she puts out is everywhere, so they should be easy to find. In them, she does exactly what the court has told her not to do, which is litigate the case in the media. They purport to summarize her testimony at Monday's hearing.

Unlike Ms. Weaver, the receiver, Phillip Young, has kept a low profile. You can, however, read the affidavit he submitted to the court which, as he says in the filing notice, contains everything he intended to say on Monday. The affidavit is 35 pages, plus exhibits. So, between Ms. Weaver's videos and Mr. Young's affidavit, you have the gist of what was presented Monday.

I offer all this because while I continue to follow the story with great interest I don't intend to duplicate or compete with the resources listed above. 

That said, let's jump ahead to some key facts and conclusions. According to the receiver's affidavit, Uncle Nearest's secured debt is $110M. Unsecured debt is $54M, so total debt is $164M. There is another $10M in something styled as a futures contract but it is, effectively, another debt, bringing the total to $174M. 

Since nothing is being paid, the interest on that $174M is accruing daily.

As for the business itself, revenue in 2024 was about $41M. It fell to $25M in 2025. The receiver reports that the company was losing about $1M a month, which has been reduced to $100,000 a month, but it still operates at a loss.

The receiver has two jobs, stabilize the business as much as possible and then either refinance the secured debt or sell the assets. As I outlined last week, the company's tangible assets, such as real estate and liquid inventory, in barrels and bottles, are not worth enough for their sale to cover even the secured debt for which they are collateral. 

To that end the receiver's team reached out to more than 100 entities and invited them to make an offer on either refinancing the secured debt or purchasing the assets. About 40 entities were interested enough to sign a non-disclosure agreement and kick the tires. Of these, twelve produced formal written letters of interest. No party offered a valuation in excess of the secured debt. 

As for what happens next, the receiver concludes that "a sale in the next six months is the only viable option to maximize the value of the Company and its assets."

Although Fawn Weaver no longer insists the company is worth $1.1B, her new claim is $500M. The receiver, of course, estimates that what the market is willing to pay is much less, substantially less than the $110M owed to Farm Credit. The basis for the difference is the value of the intangible asset, the Uncle Nearest brand. 

If the judge decides to end the receivership, control will not be returned to the Weavers, it can't be. That part of this story is already over. They have lost the company. It's gone. Farm Credit owns everything, which they will sell for whatever they can get, either altogether or in pieces. They may wind up with fifty cents on the dollar, if that. 

Tangible assets are the easy part. I'm not sure how a sale of the intangible assets will play out, but I find it hard to imagine any existing distilled spirits producer taking a gamble on keeping Uncle Nearest products in the marketplace. I can't foresee Fawn Weaver becoming a brand ambassador for Diageo, but maybe that's my failure of imagination.

The Sad Saga of Uncle Nearest Whiskey May Come to a Head on Monday

 

The Uncle Nearest home place in Shelbyville, Tennessee.

Uncle Nearest is a brand of American whiskey that launched about a decade ago. Started from nothing, it did very well, but now it’s in trouble.

A hearing on Monday at the federal courthouse in Knoxville may decide its fate.

In the beginning, there was a New York Times article by Clay Risen, headlined “Jack Daniel’s Embraces a Hidden Ingredient, Help from a Slave.” The story goes that Fawn Weaver read the article about Nearest Green and began a journey of discovery that led her to found the brand. She hired esteemed actor Jeffrey Wright to star in a promotional film. The History Channel included Nearest Green in its show about the founding of Jack Daniel’s.

The Uncle Nearest product line.

The new brand benefited from the bourbon boom and from its unique appeal to Black drinkers. The whiskey itself was initially acquired on the bulk whiskey market. As the brand became established, and bulk whiskey became pricey because of high demand, the company entered into a production agreement with Tennessee Distilling Group, a contract distiller in Columbia, Tennessee.

That was supposed to be temporary. The Uncle Nearest company bought Sandy Creek, a former horse farm in Shelbyville, Tennessee, about 16 miles from where Jack Daniel’s is made, as a brand home place. They made many improvements, including buying a still. It was delivered and set up in 2022 but never installed.

Uncle Nearest Founder and CEO Fawn Weaver.

It’s common for a fast-growing company to have some bumps along the way, and Uncle Nearest certainly did. Fawn Weaver became not just the founder and CEO but the living, breathing face of the brand. She made many media and in-store appearances, signing bottles and kibitzing with fans. She was seemingly everywhere. In June of 2024 she released a book, Love and Whiskey, billed as “The remarkable true story of Jack Daniel, his master distiller Nearest Green, and the improbable rise of Uncle Nearest.” She promoted it with a national tour that also promoted Uncle Nearest whiskey.

A year later, the wheels started to come off. Farm Credit Mid-America filed a lawsuit in federal court against Uncle Nearest, Inc., Nearest Green Distillery, Inc., Uncle Nearest Real Estate Holdings, LLC, and Fawn Weaver and Keith Weaver personally for defaulting on over $100M in loans that originated in 2022 and have been in default since 2024.

In September, a receivership was established and the Weavers lost control of the company. The receiver is running it now, supervised by the court. The Weavers, naturally, want the company back. As the receiver has tried to right the ship he has discovered a web of different Weaver-controlled businesses, funded by the Farm Credit loans and Uncle Nearest investors, that were not part of the original lawsuit. In a court hearing scheduled for Monday, February 9th, the receiver will ask the court to expand the receivership to include those entities. At that same hearing, the Weavers will try to end the receivership and regain control.

The Farm Credit loan is secured by the company’s assets. There are also many unsecured debts. Total indebtedness is around $160M. The receiver reports that the company is insolvent. The receiver’s goal continues to be to refinance the debt or sell the company, though he reports that he has not received any viable offers to do either.

Because the Weavers have fought the receivership every step of the way, there have been many filings, claims, and counterclaims flying back and forth. Despite warnings from the court, Fawn Weaver has litigated the case in the media. Every twist and turn has been well documented by several news outlets, so I won’t try to summarize them any further. Both sides will plead their cases and present their evidence and the judge will decide.

Among other things, the receiver predicts that if the court ends the receivership on Monday, Farm Credit will immediately foreclose and begin to liquidate the company’s assets.

So, what are the assets and how much are they worth? There is real estate, in Tennessee, Massachusetts, and France. It includes all the improvements on those properties. 

According to AcreValue, the going rate for farmland in Bedford County, Tennessee is $15,040 per acre and Sandy Creek is 270 acres. The Massachusetts property is a house, listed for $2.25M. It’s unclear what the property in France includes, but it is identified in documents as a “Cognac Chateau.” At a minimum, that should mean real estate, some buildings, and aging stock. It may or may not include a distillery.

In addition to real estate, there is whiskey, in barrels and bottles. At this point, the youngest whisky in barrels is 2 years old, and most of the inventory is less than 4 years old. They produced regularly until December 2023, so each month the inventory of 4-year-olds increases and the inventory of immature whiskey decreases, unless they resume production. The aging stock is about 56,000 barrels. The cost, as new make, was $673 per barrel.

The potentially most valuable asset is also the most volatile one, the intellectual property, specifically the Uncle Nearest brand. Depending how all this goes, it could be worth millions or nothing. Fawn Weaver seems to believe there is no Uncle Nearest brand without Fawn Weaver, and that may be the thing she is most wrong about.

In addition to losing her company, Fawn Weaver faces a sexual harassment lawsuit in New York (Menos v. Uncle Nearest Inc. et al) that was filed in 2022 and has survived several attempts to make it go away. It is scheduled for trial in July.

I predict the hearing on Monday will be brief. The judge will grant everything the receiver wants, in particular control of the other entities. One naturally wonders what Weaver will do next but that’s increasingly irrelevant. Unless she pulls $160M out of a hat, there is nothing she can do. 

"My" Peter Pan

 

Watching Mary Martin's "Peter Pan" on TV
was a major milestone for young boomers. 

NBC was the first American television network to broadcast in color, in 1954. That is, they broadcast some programs in color, just a handful at first. Most were still black and white. The three principal commercial television networks and their broadcast stations adopted color slowly. The last one to go all-color was ABC in 1966.

But NBC was first and showcased its leadership with a program called “Producers’ Showcase.” It was mostly highbrow stuff, Shakespeare, Coward, other plays, ballets, classical music, and Broadway musicals. It ran for three years, 37 episodes, all in color and all performed live. There were no reruns.

One of their most successful productions, the only one done twice, was “Peter Pan,” a musical spectacular then running on Broadway. Most musicals are identified by the names of their composers, but this “Peter Pan” is indelibly associated with its star, Mary Martin. 

The “Producers’ Showcase” presentation of “Peter Pan” was broadcast on March 7, 1955, a Monday.

I was 3 ½ years old.

To say I remember it might be overstatement, but I know I saw it, and loved it, and watched it again ten months later. Like the original, the 1956 broadcast was performed live. Everything was the same. In 1960, they did it one more time. Videotape had been invented by then, so it was recorded, periodically replayed, and eventually released on home video. If you’ve seen it, that’s probably the one you’ve seen. A kinescope of the original 1955 broadcast is available on the free streamer Pluto TV, and probably YouTube and other places.

A kinescope is simply a film, typically 16mm, made by aiming a film camera at a TV monitor. It synchronizes the TV’s frame rate with that of the film camera, but that’s as sophisticated as the technology got. Kinescopes were used to make a record of live programs, but they weren’t intended for rebroadcast, just reference. The quality is poor and although the program was broadcast in color, the kinescope is black and white.

My mother had the 1954 original Broadway cast recording of this “Peter Pan,” a portfolio of 78-RPM records. Each disk contained two songs, one on each side. Although 33 1/3 long-playing (LP) records had been around for a few years, 78s were still being released in 1954. 

My mother loved the musical and loved that I loved it. We would listen to the records together and sing along. It’s a happy memory. That production of that musical will always be Peter Pan to me.

I keep saying “that production” and “this version” because there have been a bunch.

The character and story of Peter Pan were created in 1904 by J. M. Barrie, originally as a play. From the beginning the part of Peter, a young boy, was always played by an adult woman. In the original West End production, the “lost boys,” Peter’s crew, were all played by adult women too. 

Barrie subsequently reworked the play as a novel. The story and character became very popular and there were many productions and adaptations. Barrie wrote several sequels. The first film version was made in 1924.

Walt Disney started to think about an animated adaptation in 1935. He originally intended it to follow “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” his first feature-length cartoon. He obtained the film rights in 1938. “Pinocchio” took Peter’s place in Disney’s queue, and the project was shelved when WWII began. It finally went into production in 1949 and hit theaters in 1953. 

As a kid, I liked the Disney version well enough. I even liked a couple of the songs, but the Mary Martin version will always be my favorite. 

While Disney was working on his Pan, Leonard Bernstein was working on his. Bernstein’s version debuted in 1950 with Jean Arthur as Peter and Boris Karloff as Captain Hook. It was a “play with songs,” as opposed to a full musical. It ran for 321 performances, closing in January of 1951. Despite Bernstein’s prominence, his Pan was overshadowed by the Disney cartoon and 1954 musical and is almost completely forgotten today.

In later years it was discovered that Bernstein wrote a full musical, but it was pared down for the 1950 production. That version has since been revived but only in concert form. It hasn’t been restaged. It is available on CD.

Coming along after Bernstein and Disney, producer Edwin Lester created his Peter Pan (i.e., my Peter Pan) specifically as a vehicle for Mary Martin, a popular Broadway star. It was originally a play with songs but was reworked into a full musical. It was a huge hit even before the 1955 television broadcast made it legendary.

Unlike “Producers’ Showcase,” most television programs in the 1950s were produced on film. Unlike the crude, 16mm kinescopes this was 35mm film, essentially the same technology as movies. All sitcoms and prime time dramas were made this way. (Daytime soaps were live.) With today’s digital film restoration technology, these films now look incredibly sharp and crisp, like they were made yesterday. This isn’t always a good thing. You can see how cheaply most of the sets were made. 

I went down the Peter Pan rabbit hole because I’ve been enjoying another favorite from my childhood, “The Danny Thomas Show,” also known as “Make Room for Daddy.” I recently saw an episode in which Kathy Nolan appears as an aspiring performer seeking Danny’s help. Nolan played Wendy Darling in the Mary Martin “Peter Pan.” She later played Kate McCoy in “The Real McCoys,” so she was all over my childhood.

Another TV icon, Tony Soprano, said, "nostalgia is the lowest form of conversation." Considering the source, nostalgia about old TV shows must be lower still. I’ve seen many changes in my 74 years, in televised entertainment and just about everything else, and will probably see many more before I go. One of the pleasures of old age is having lived through and experienced a lot of history first hand.

Sorry, but that’s as profound as I can manage at the moment.