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.