It all started with current owner Colby Frey’s great-great-grandfather Charles who built one of the first original homesteads in Northern Nevada back in 1854. He was one of eight people to get deeded in Nevada, living on the land that is now called 25 Ranch.
In its next generation, Charles’ son (a.k.a. Colby’s great-grandfather) moved to Fallon in the early 1920s and bought a property called Island Ranch for $60,000, considered a lot of money at the time.This was the house that Colby’s grandfather was raised in and later Colby’s dad.
When Colby’s father ran the ranch, he decided to plant grapes to make wine as grapes are a crop known for conserving water. However, Charlie was getting Napa Valley yield with Lodi prices, and needed to procure more money to justify the expenses.
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There are a lot of different variables that affect farming, making growing anything on a large scale and making a living off it hard work. Colby saw all of that, working the farm and driving tractors from a pretty young age, and didn’t deter him from following in the previous Frey’s’ footsteps.
“Ever since I was a little boy, I wanted to be a farmer,” Colby says. “But it’s a tremendous number of hours. You can work your butt off one year and not make anything, and then the next year can be completely different. Farmers always have so many different obstacles to overcome. That’s why 165 years of knowledge is important because the land has talked to us throughout the years.”
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Colby was able to take over the farm because his family sold it to him for market value of the business, and he is grateful to have been able to procure the land at a reasonable price. However, when Colby took over the farm, he figured he could already take the grain growing on it and turn it into something he liked: whiskey.
“I thought, I like whiskey better than wine, so why not take those crops and mash, mill, distill them, and convert it into liquor?” Colby realized.
Therefore, using his family’s centuries-worth of knowledge and experience, Colby determined that with the ranch’s specific soil, climate, and irrigation techniques, him and his wife Ashley (who grew up in Gardnerville and he met attending University of Nevada, Reno) could make quality bourbons and ryes within this fifth generation of Frey Ranch.
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The ranch was rebranded as a whiskey maker in 2006 when they got a federal license to legally distill the whiskey. However, according to Nevada state law they couldn’t sell it until 2013. That was when they started aging the whiskey – which took 5-8 years – and why no one really heard of Frey Ranch spirits until its first batches were released in 2019.
“Those years between 2006-2013 were a blessing in disguise because it made us slow down, figure out how to grow the grains, mash techniques, and yeast varieties,” Colby explains.
The ranch is 2,000 acres now, and the Freys built a state-of-the-art distillery.
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Frey Ranch harvests the grain and puts it into silos, milling, mashing, fermenting, and distilling it,” he says. The process of milling and mashing goes quickly, but then it sits in the barrels for at least half a decade.
Through its California fulfillment center, Frey Ranch can ship its spirits to 30 states, and even sends a pallet to The Whisky Exchange in London.
"In wineries they grow all their own ingredients but in liquor-making, not so much. We’re one of the only few places that grows and uses 100 percent of our ingredients,” he says.
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Back in 2013 when Colby and Ashley Frey broke ground on a distillery to produce ultra-premium whiskey using grains grown on their 2,500-acre farm in Fallon, they made just 4,000 nine-liter cases of whiskey.
Today, Frey Ranch produces more than 100,000 nine-liter cases of whiskey annually, which is about 1.2 million one-liter bottles of its signature bourbon, rye, and uncut farm-strength bourbon. A recent expansion of distillery operations, combined with brand expansions in multiple states, has the Frey’s raising a glass and toasting the good life.
It wasn’t always high times at Frey Ranch, though. Although the distillery produced its first spirits when operations came online in 2014, it wasn’t until five years later in December 2019 that the Freys were able to release their initial run of barrel-aged whiskey and finally draw some revenue from their production efforts.
“In 2014, I wish we had made a lot more,” Colby Frey said. “Even with COVID, we still met our sales goals, and we only sold in Nevada and just started selling in California.”
Income from crops grown on the ranch, as well as helping out other Churchill County farmers during harvest time, helped make ends meet during the lean years, Colby Frey said. “Every dollar we made we put into buying some more whiskey barrels or into the distillery,” he said.
Ashley Frey said that despite knowing there would be a huge gap in time before Frey Ranch was able to draw revenue from its initial whiskey production, they still were confident they had a winning business plan.
“There really isn’t anyone else in the United States that’s growing their own grains on site and producing whiskey,” she said.
“It’s the triple threat – we have good whiskey, a good story, and good packaging, and that appeals to a lot of people, especially as we begin to expand,” she added.
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