In 2017 Fawn Weaver began bottling Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey as a passion project to honor Nearest Green, the formerly enslaved distiller who taught Jack Daniel how to make whiskey.
Uncle Nearest is now the nation’s fastest-growing whiskey brand…
On Tuesday, Ms. Weaver, the company’s founder and chief executive, went a step further toward diversifying an industry long dominated by white men, as the company announced the creation of a $50 million investment fund aimed at helping minority-owned spirits businesses grow..
Ms. Weaver said she quickly realized that no amount of support with branding, strategy and publicity would make a difference if these entrepreneurs continued to be shut out from capital.
“It’s not that people of color don’t have an interest. It’s that we find that they have no path of entry into the industry, no connections where others may,” Ms. Lehrman said. “It’s a very, very tough industry to break into, and if you’re a woman or a person of color, it’s even harder….”
“The reason why there aren’t more Black-owned spirits companies is really simple: It’s the sheer cost of entry in this business,” Mr. McFarlane said. “I would say access to capital, having those connections, is the No. 1 thing holding back Black entrepreneurs.”
Jack Daniel’s Embraces a Hidden Ingredient: Help From a Slave
Enslaved men not only made up the bulk of the distilling labor force, but they often played crucial skilled roles in the whiskey-making process. In the same way that white cookbook authors often appropriated recipes from their black cooks, white distillery owners took credit for the whiskey.
When Jack Daniel’s Failed to Honor a Slave, an Author Rewrote History
“It’s absolutely critical that the story of Nearest gets added to the Jack Daniel story,” Mark I. McCallum, the president of Jack Daniel’s Brands at Brown-Forman, said in an interview.
The company’s decision to recognize its debt to a slave, first reported last year by The New York Times, is a momentous turn in the history of Southern foodways. Even as black innovators in Southern cooking and agriculture are beginning to get their due, the tale of American whiskey is still told as a whites-only affair, about Scots-Irish settlers who brought Old World distilling knowledge to the frontier states of Tennessee and Kentucky.
Green’s story changes all that by showing how enslaved people likely provided the brains as well as the brawn in what was an arduous, dangerous and highly technical operation.
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