The Nevada Farm Whiskey Lovers Need To Visit

Colby Frey is giving a virtual tour of his family's multigenerational farmland. Taking you past three silos, a house built in 1918, and a charming office, he remarks on that "beautiful green rye field" in the distance, where the hardy winter grain is growing from last September's planting. Extending its roots deep into the soil to create a healthy network that can endure drought and pull more nutrients, it feels emblematic of his own roots here, where his grandfather bought land in 1944 after selling his old land to his brother for a buck.

Soon that rye will be harvested and brought on a very short trip here to the cadre of buildings where the whiskey gets made and aged, and where Frey himself enjoys a short commute to his front door. You might be enjoying this very same rye in a bottle on your shelf come the 2030s. But you don't need to love whiskey to appreciate everything happening at Frey Ranch Distillery's Nevada distillery (though it sure helps); you just have to admire things like efficiency, economy, and ecology.

While plenty of distilleries source grain locally, Frey Ranch Distillery is pretty special in doing it the way whiskey was originally made, at the farms that grew the grains. The distillery uses corn, wheat, rye, and barley—the big four of American whiskey mash bills, and even malts its own barley (often the other grains, too, which is less common).

There's a good reason for this. Co-op grain bulk sales get siloed by crop type, and can include dozens of sources. Buying externally, says Colby Frey, leaves distilleries in the dark on a lot of aspects that go into their whiskeys. "You don't know how they were grown and what pesticides are put on it, what the total details of exactly what was done to it. You just get what you get, and you don't know if they put on a bunch of nitrogen, and then the proteins are high."

The best way to know what the composition and life story of the crop is? Grow it yourself. Whereas 60% of crops are grown for livestock feed, with an eye on protein development and big yields, Frey Ranch Distillery is more interested in starches and quality plant life for its own whiskey.

Frey Ranch Distillery is located in the "beautiful green valley," of Fallon, Nevada. You get the sense beautiful and green are yoked adjectives in Colby Frey's heart. Frey's family has farmed land around The Oasis of Nevada since 1854, which is older than Nevada itself has been a U.S. state (becoming one on Halloween, 1864, for the record). His grandfather purchased this particular ranch in 1944, and though it gets relatively little rainfall, receives good runoff.

Frey Ranch Distillery itself is flood-irrigated, meaning the plants efficiently receive exactly as much water as they need and no more. The dry air benefits the plants immensely, sparing them the health hazards of mold, mildew, and fungus. It also spares the distillery the need to hire crop dusters, and whiskey fans the mild concern over fungicide in their rocks glass.

Low humidity also means that water will evaporate faster than alcohol, according to Frey. While the high summer temperatures might still cost some angel's share, the humidity-controlled rickhouse keeps things sweet in relative humidity while unconditioned temperatures do wild things to that whiskey.

Whiskey lovers will geek out on the Vendome copper & brass pot still; Colby Frey does, and he's owned it for years. Without spoiling the punchline for you, a visit to Frey Ranch Distillery comes with a guaranteed laugh as he tells the tale of assembling it by close-ups of photos to save $35,000 on an in-house professional install. "We're farmers, we'll figure it out," he told his supplier, and sonofagun, they did.

The problem with the pot still, he says, is that it's hard to produce distillate in volume. So the eight-percent-ABV distiller's beer is first run through a column still to achieve most of the desired effects in bulk. That done, it finally enters the pot still for a more refined, second distillation that produces the kind of soft-flavored 40-percent-ABV distillate the team considers essential to age into great whiskey.

And unlike comparably sized distilleries that Frey says spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to cool their stills and fermenters, his ranch just pumps water to use as a heat sink from the onsite reservoir and back, cooling along the length of pipe for its return journey. He estimates it only costs a couple thousand dollars a year, with the attendant energy savings. Frey Ranch Distillery's water canals are hand-powered and gravity-driven.

After making the wort for the yeast to eat, Frey Ranch Distillery is sitting on several tons of spent grains. Colby Frey says a comparable distiller would have had to dilute their runoff with 20 parts water to legally dispose of it in the storm drain. But on the farm? They just use a dewatering screw press to separate the grains from the excess water. And just like that, the farm team now has a free acidic soil amendment to use on its alkaline lands, saving water instead of expending it at 2000 percent.

The grain then travels less than a mile next door, to a dairy whose cows eat it for dinner. Eventually it comes right back from the cows as manure, and gets spread on the fields for the next batch of crops. "Manure is the best fertilizer," says Frey, meaning it's preferable for two reasons over the commercial stuff that has traveled the world. "Think about how much it costs to refine it, energy-wise, it consumes to refine it, to get it to us here. We're literally using it from right next door."

About those energy savings ... when your farming roots go back to one of Nevada's eight original deeded properties, you know the importance of taking custody of the land to see it flourish for future generations. To that end, Frey Ranch Distillery prioritizes low-energy consumption and ecological grow methods. Frey calls it "one of the most naturally sustainable distilleries in the world."

That's why the bottom of every bottle reads, "Be good to the land, and it will be good to you." It's apparent that Frey takes this to heart, saying he doesn't even like to talk about it, for fear of using what's right as a marketing slogan. "It's who we are, it's what we should do, and I just hate the boxes that everybody paints you into," he says, "But if everybody is that way, then the world would be such a better place." He speaks passionately about his responsibility to give the land to the next generation better than he received it, a process which includes a seven-year crop rotation to maintain the land's biome. And if that's not worth a toast, what is?