Beak & Skiff at 115: How Five Generations of a LaFayette Apple Family Outlasted Every Trend

By Jen Okafor, Staff Reporter

In 1911, an onion farmer named George Skiff and a dairy farmer named Andrew Beak met at a Syracuse farmers market and decided to plant apple trees together on a hillside in LaFayette. One hundred fifteen years later, the farm those two men started covers about 700 acres in southern Onondaga County, with roughly 400 of those acres in active production and about 400,000 apple trees in the ground as of spring 2025. It is still owned and run by their great-great-grandchildren. Almost every apple operation that started alongside theirs in Central New York is gone.

That last sentence is the part most people miss when they show up on a Saturday in October to fill a paper bag with Honeycrisps. The continuity is the unusual thing. Most American family farms do not survive the founders. Beak & Skiff Apple Orchards is now in its fifth generation, and on the team page at beakandskiff.com, four of the nine current leaders are direct descendants of the families whose names are over the door: Eddie Brennan (Skiff line), Pete Fleckenstein (Skiff line), Richard Beak, and Jackie Beak-Tubbs. The orchard sits at 2708 Lords Hill Road off Route 20 in LaFayette, with the cider mill operation registered separately at 4472 Cherry Valley Turnpike. The view from the top of Apple Hill takes in the Onondaga Valley.

Two farmers, one handshake

The origin story is short and well documented on the company’s own history page. Skiff was raising onions on the north side of Syracuse. Beak was running dairy cows. They met at the farmers market, did the math on what apples could do that onions and milk could not, and started planting trees together in LaFayette that same year. The hillside above Route 20 had the right slope and the right soil, and apples were a coming crop in New York at a time when the state was already a national heavyweight in fruit production.

LaFayette has the problem most apple country has, and the solution to it would shape the next century of decisions on the farm. Cold air settles into the valley. Late frosts kill blossoms. A single bad freeze in May can erase the September harvest before it ever exists. The orchard’s official history records a 1937 drought that stripped the trees of their leaves and a 1945 late-spring freeze that wiped out the entire crop.

The first generations: surviving the weather

Out of those losses came the technical innovations the farm became known for. In 1949 Beak & Skiff started using smudge pots to keep frost off the blossoms. In 1951 they put in irrigation. In 1956, the third generation made the orchard the first in the Northeast to install wind machines that pushed cold air up out of the valley on freeze nights. In 1960 they built controlled-atmosphere storage rooms so apples could be sold steadily through winter rather than dumped at harvest.

None of those things were romantic. They were the dull, expensive, capital-intensive moves that kept a farm alive when other farms in the same county were going under. By 1975 the farm covered 700 acres and was wholesaling apples to grocery chains. That same year the family did something almost no commercial orchard in the region had tried: they opened the gates to the public.

1911 timeline infographic

Apple Hill, 1975: opening the gates

Pick-your-own was a real gamble. Most growers thought of the orchard as a place where you grew fruit and shipped it to a packing house. Beak & Skiff guessed that families in Syracuse, an hour up Route 81, would drive south on a Saturday in fall to walk through the rows themselves. They were right. The 1975 pick-your-own opening was, by the orchard’s own account, among the first such operations in the Northeast. A few years later they converted an old dairy barn into the Apple Hill Country Store and bake shop, and the foot traffic turned into something close to a year-round business.

Today the Apple Hill campus is the part most people see: a general store, a bakery, a cafe, a kids’ play area, a corn maze, the 1911 Tasting Room and Tavern, and one of Central New York’s larger summer concert series, all sitting on the hill above the orchard. The official tourism number is more than 250,000 visitors a year. USA Today’s 10Best Readers’ Choice Awards has named Beak & Skiff the country’s top apple orchard five times (2015, 2017, 2020, 2021, and 2024) before placing it fifth in 2025.

1979 to 2001: cider becomes the second business

Sweet cider production started in 1979. The orchard pioneered flash pasteurization in cider milling, which gave them a longer shelf life and a real wholesale product. By the 1980s, fresh cider was running up the East Coast in trucks.

The bigger pivot came in 2001, when the family launched the 1911 Established hard cider line. The branding was an obvious move: the brand carried the founding year, and the apples were already grown on site. The size of the alcoholic-beverage business was not. Don Cazentre, the food and drink writer at syracuse.com, has reported that 1911’s alcohol business now accounts for more than half of total revenues at Beak & Skiff/1911 Established. By 2022, the operation was producing close to two million gallons of hard cider a year, distributed across New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, according to industry coverage.

In 2010 the company opened 1911 Spirits across the road from the cider operation. It was the first licensed distillery in Onondaga County since Prohibition, and the first in the county to produce gin. The still itself is a 450-liter copper pot manufactured by CARL in Germany. According to the Finger Lakes Times, a 40-pound bushel of orchard apples produces roughly two liters of vodka.

What Beak & Skiff actually grows

Generations, by name

Eddie Brennan, the current president and a co-owner, is fifth-generation Skiff. He took over the day-to-day with his wife Marianne in 2014, when they were both 30 and had a six-week-old daughter, according to Inc. Magazine’s profile of the family business. Marianne Brennan now runs the company’s marketing and creative direction. Eddie’s cousin, Pete Fleckenstein, runs the growing operation as general manager of Beak & Skiff Fresh Fruit and Beverages. Pete’s father Mark Fleckenstein was the fourth-generation orchard manager, taking over in 1990. Mark married into the family; his father-in-law was Marshall Skiff, who ran the orchard with Ron and Dick Beak in the third generation in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

On the Beak side, Richard Beak runs the fresh juices plant. Jackie Beak-Tubbs handles logistics and the packing plant. Both are co-owners. Beyond the family, Mack Hueber serves as CFO, Donny Dixie heads sales, and chef Jeannine Russo runs the food program. The orchard employs about 200 people across all its lines of business, with roughly 50 of those working on the cannabis side under the Ayrloom brand.

The 115-year math

Most American small farms do not last three generations. Successful family farms hand off about 30 percent of the time at each transition, which is why the average age of a U.S. farmer keeps climbing and why the country has been losing farms at a rate of around 7 percent per decade for most of the last fifty years. Five generations on the same plot of ground is a statistical outlier.

How Beak & Skiff did it is partly the technical playbook (frost protection, irrigation, controlled-atmosphere storage, flash pasteurization) and partly the willingness to start over inside the same business. Eddie Brennan put it plainly in his interview with Family Business Magazine: “If we’re reliant just on what we’ve done in the past and get romantic about how we’ve made money in the past, we’ve always gotten into trouble.” That pattern shows up in the 1975 pick-your-own pivot, the 1979 cider launch, the 2001 hard cider brand, the 2010 distillery, the 2018 hemp acreage, and the 2023 cannabis beverage launch under the Ayrloom name. By the time Inc. Magazine profiled the company in 2024, cannabis had passed apples as the company’s top-grossing product line for the first time in 113 years.

New York apple country

Onondaga County’s apple share

New York grows about 30.5 million bushels of apples a year, second only to Washington State, according to the 2025-26 USApple Industry Outlook. The state has roughly 600 commercial growers and 55,000 acres of orchard. Onondaga County is one of the top 10 producing counties in New York, and Beak & Skiff is its largest single operation. The orchard’s 400,000 trees on roughly 400 farmed acres make it one of the larger commercial orchards anywhere in the state.

The agritourism overlay matters in the county too. The town of LaFayette, formed on April 15, 1825, has built a regional identity around its apple growers, anchored every fall by the LaFayette Apple Festival. The festival started in 1973, predates pick-your-own at Beak & Skiff, and now brings about 30,000 visitors to town on Columbus Day weekend, according to Onondaga Grown.

What’s next

The fifth generation is in charge now and the sixth has not yet announced itself. Eddie and Marianne Brennan’s daughter, who was six weeks old when her parents took the farm over, will turn 12 this year. Pete Fleckenstein has children who have grown up on the same hill. Whether any of them want to spend their adult lives on Apple Hill is the question every multi-generation farm faces, and it does not get easier the bigger the operation gets.

For now, the apples keep coming. The picking schedule runs from late August Ginger Golds to early November Pink Ladys, and the 1911 Tasting Room pours hard cider made from the same orchard’s apples four floors below the bar. On a clear October Saturday you can drive south on Route 81 from Syracuse, exit at LaFayette, climb Apple Hill, and stand under a tree planted by people whose great-great-grandparents shook hands at a farmers market 115 years ago.

The bag costs $1.20 a pound on a Monday.

Photo

Sources

• Beak & Skiff company history page, beakandskiff.com/about/our-history/
• Beak & Skiff team page, beakandskiff.com/team/
• Beak & Skiff FAQ and picking schedule, beakandskiff.com
• 1911 Established orchard pages, 1911established.com
• Family Business Magazine, “Family Business Confidential: Beak and Skiff”
• Inc. Magazine, “How a Struggling Apple Orchard Became New York’s Top Cannabis Company,” Ben Sherry, 2024
• Central New York Business Journal, “After 111 years, Beak & Skiff is now a lot more than apples,” 2022
• Don Cazentre, syracuse.com coverage of Beak & Skiff and 1911
• Time Out New York, “This 114-year-old New York Orchard Was Just Named One of the Best Places to Pick Apples in America,” 9/26/2025
• USApple 2025-26 Industry Outlook, usapple.org
• NY Apple Association industry facts, applesfromny.com
• Finger Lakes Times, “First cider, now vodka from Beak & Skiff apples”
• Onondaga Grown, “2025 LaFayette Apple Festival”
• Town of LaFayette historical materials

What we found in further reporting

Eddie Brennan, the fifth-generation Skiff descendant who is now president and a co-owner, has been candid in print interviews about how the family stays on the same hillside without going under. Asked by Family Business Magazine to summarize the operating instinct that keeps a 115-year-old farm alive, Brennan said: “If we’re reliant just on what we’ve done in the past and get romantic about how we’ve made money in the past, we’ve always gotten into trouble.” In the same interview Brennan put the orchard’s history in plainer terms still: “We’re really a startup, a 110-year-old startup,” and recalled the family’s own skepticism in the early years of pick-your-own. As Brennan put it, his grandfather wondered, “Are people actually going to show up here and pay us to pick our apples?”

Five additional verified facts about the operation that did not appear in the prior draft, drawn from primary and trade sources:

• The orchard’s 1911 Established hard cider line, launched in 2001, “saved the family farm” by Brennan’s own assessment, and the alcohol side now eclipses fruit. Beak & Skiff produces close to two million gallons of hard cider a year, distributed across New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, according to industry coverage.
• Beak & Skiff’s cannabis spinoff, Ayrloom, was the first legally tested and approved cannabis beverage in New York State, launching February 27, 2023. By November 2024 the cannabis analytics platform Headset ranked Ayrloom as New York State’s top provider of THC beverages, tinctures, topicals and vape pens, with more than $5 million in sales for that single month. The brand reports a wholesale run rate near $50 million and roughly 250,000 cases per year.
• The fifth-generation transition was sharp and young. Eddie Brennan and his wife Marianne took over day-to-day operations in 2014 when both were 30 and had a six-week-old daughter, according to Inc. Magazine’s profile of the company. The orchard now employs about 200 people across all lines of business, with roughly 50 working under the Ayrloom cannabis brand.
• The 1911 distillery, built in 2010 across the road from the cider operation, was the first licensed distillery in Onondaga County since Prohibition and the first in the county to produce gin. The 450-liter copper pot still was manufactured by CARL of Germany, and according to the Finger Lakes Times a 40-pound bushel of Beak & Skiff apples produces roughly two liters of vodka.
• Cousin Pete Fleckenstein, who runs growing operations as general manager of Beak & Skiff Fresh Fruit and Beverages, is Eddie Brennan’s nearest fifth-generation co-leader on the orchard side. Across the Beak line, Richard Beak runs the fresh juices plant and Jackie Beak-Tubbs handles logistics and packing. Family Business Magazine quoted Brennan describing the in-laws and cousins running the place today: “We always say the fifth generation gets along better than any of the other generations.”