Uncle Nearest is in financial turmoil and now at risk of foreclosure, according to new documents in an ongoing case.
The Black-owned whiskey brand is at risk of financial insolvency and owes millions of dollars to external parties, like its vendors, according to claims from the company’s receiver in an affidavit filed on February 2 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee. This stems from Farm Credit Mid-America, the company’s main creditor, filing a lawsuit against Uncle Nearest, Inc. and its founders Fawn and Keith Weaver in July 2025, that claimed it was owed $108 million. The lender alleged the company has been in default on its loans as early as January 2024.
If the court-appointed receivership (which is led by Tennessee attorney Phillip G. Young) ends, there’s a chance of foreclosure. “I believe that Farm Credit would immediately cease covering these operational losses and move to foreclose on and repossess its collateral,” according to an affidavit by Young on the whiskey brand founded in 2016.
Uncle Nearest — which Forbes estimated was worth more than $1 billion in 2024 — did not immediately respond to ESSENCE’s request for comment. Founders of the whiskey brand previously said claims Farm Credit made against them are “salacious and inaccurate.” Unsealed court documents include financial records, like the company’s bank statements, are now open to the public.
NexGen2780, an investor group registered in Georgia, has expressed interest in acquiring the company’s assets and settling its debt. It reportedly sent a proposal letter to the receiver. But at this time, reports show the Weavers are seeking relief, trying to regain control, and stop the selling of assets.
The whiskey brand has a court-filed affidavit due on February 5. But by February 3, CEO Fawn Weaver already shared a statement in an internal email obtained by the Lexington Herald-Leader, where she wrote, “neither Keith nor I have ever personally gained anything monetarily from Uncle Nearest.”
Months after Farm Credit Mid-America brought its suit, the Weavers filed a civil lawsuit against the company’s former CFO Michael Senzaki early January 2026. It claims breach of fiduciary duty, fraud, defamation, and more, seeking compensation and damages. Farm Credit maintains that Uncle Nearest’s collateral, like its barrels of whiskey, were inflated. In their suit, the Weavers blame this on the ex-CFO.
Weaver built the brand without traditional venture capital money. Instead, according to Forbes, she won over the support of at least 163 individual investors with an average contribution of $500,000. “This industry has over a 99% failure rate for new brands that launch. I’m one of the 1% to succeed. It would have been so easy to sell it for a billion dollars and go, ‘I’m just going to rest,’” Weaver said in a May 2024 Forbes interview. “No matter how hard it was, there wasn’t a price that they could buy this company for.”
Uncle Nearest is named after Nearest Green, the first known African American master distiller in the United States. Green, who was enslaved, was instrumental in creating Tennessee whiskey and taught Jack Daniels the distillation process. Green also served as the Daniels brand’s first master distiller. The brand itself didn’t just win hundreds awards for its spirits over the years, but it also stood as a beacon of Black history, invention, and wealth creation.
More updates are expected from a February 9 hearing in Knoxville when a federal judge will hear arguments.