Colby & Ashley Frey

Colby Frey was born on February 14, 1984. He grew up with dirt under his fingernails and long horizons in his eyes. Northern Nevada’s high desert has a way of making a farmer early, and Colby’s family had been at it since 1854, when his great-great-grandfather Charles built one of the region’s first homesteads. The Freys raised grain and cattle through boom years and busts, their story braided into Nevada’s own. On that land, flat, wind-scoured, and stubbornly fertile, Colby learned that you don’t just take from the ground; you steward it so the next generation has reason to stay.

By the time he was a teenager, Colby’s daydreams ran on two tracks: farming and flavor. Grain had always left the ranch in trucks, faceless. He was curious what it would become if the family turned it into something with a voice. After high school, he headed to the University of Nevada, Reno. There, in 2004, he met a classmate from Gardnerville named Ashley Bergan. She was bright, kinetic, and didn’t have a farming background, but she had an appetite for challenges and the kind of optimism that shrugs at long odds. They started talking, and the conversation never really stopped. Ashley carved her own early path in casino marketing and legal services, picking up a toolkit she would later pour into the family business. She liked telling stories and building experiences, skills that didn’t seem destined for a tractor cab, until Colby floated an idea: what if the Freys made whiskey from their own grain, right there on the ranch? The notion combined his childhood love of agriculture with an adult taste for the patient craft of distilling. Together, Colby and Ashley started sketching a future.

In the spring of 2006, long before “grain-to-glass” became a chorus line in American whiskey, the couple secured their license to distill and formally founded Frey Ranch Distillery on the family farm outside Fallon. They didn’t intend to be a tasting-room curiosity; they wanted to prove that high-desert grains could sing in a bottle, and that a true estate distillery, growing 100% of its own grains, could thrive in Nevada. They kept farming, because farming is daily bread, and began quietly laying the groundwork for the distillery that would later draw national attention.

Life moved quickly. In June 2010, the local paper announced the engagement of Ashley Bergan to Colby Frey, and that August the two married: students-turned-partners now legally and practically a team. The last name changed; the project didn’t. They were already learning how to share a calendar that had planting and harvest dates on one side and build-out deadlines on the other.

The next few years were a study in stubbornness. In 2013, they broke ground on a full distillery, betting big on warehouses, fermenters, and stills sized for a future they’d have to grow into. A year later, in 2014, their bourbon went into the barrel, where time became a business partner. Farming teaches patience, but whiskey demands it. Ashley leaned into brand-building and visitor experience; Colby tended grain and spirit with the same farmer’s precision his family had applied to irrigation schedules.

This was never a vanity project. The ranch itself, roughly 1,500 acres when they started talking distilling, growing toward 2,000 as the operation matured, remained the first and last chapter of every bottle. The Freys planted, harvested, malted, mashed, distilled, and aged in one continuous loop of responsibility. The land taught the whiskey, and the whiskey, in turn, helped secure the land for the next generation.

Frey Ranch cornfield, Churchill County, Nevada

Before long, the Freys had two children in boots and ball caps, learning the rhythms of a place where work and home blur. One son, Charley, occasionally pops up in shop-floor videos beside his dad, small hands on big tools, a living echo of five generations of farm kids before him.

In March 2024, Ashley and Colby’s alma mater, the University of Nevada, partnered with Frey Ranch on a special single-barrel release, a blue-and-silver nod to the place where Colby and Ashley first met. By midsummer, the collaboration had deepened into a limited “Silver & Blue” bottling. Awards followed, but the Freys kept their definitions of success narrow. A good day was a clean harvest, a happy tour group, a warehouse that smelled of corn and oak and future. Press notices called Frey Ranch one of the largest whiskey producers on the West Coast, and “estate” became their quiet boast, a word that meant responsibility more than prestige. In 2025, industry headlines named them the “Most Awarded Distillery of the Year” at a major spirits competition, the kind of laurel that looks dramatic on paper and mostly just makes a farm family set the alarm and go again.

In the end, when a glass of Frey Ranch bourbon or rye is poured, you’re tasting a small American wager that a young couple made in the high desert: that grain grown with care, distilled with humility, and matured within sight of its own fields can carry a place honestly. The wager seems to be paying off. A farmer and a storyteller built a life where the work of their hands and the patience of their climate come through the glass.

Sources

• Nevada Appeal, “Frey Ranch: 5 Generations…”, Kayla Anderson, December 5, 2022

• KOLO-TV, Reno, NV, story by Tabnie Dozier, March 30, 2021 https://www.kolotv.com

• Frey Ranch Founders page, freyranch.com

• The Record-Courier/engagements, Minden, NV, June 9, 2010

• University of Nevada Athletics Newsletter, “Frey Ranch Alumni…,” March 25, 2024

• Nevada Appeal, Fallon, NV, “Fallon distillery expanding by the barrel,” by Rob Sabo

• Whisky Advocate—“Frey Ranch Distillery Celebrates Its 10th Birthday…” (2024 expansion details).

•  

Contributed by Tracy McLemore, Fairview, Tennessee