page_title: Briarcliff Farms
section_title: Processing and delivery
hierarchical_section_title: Briarcliff Farms / Operations / Processing and delivery
caption_attribution_description: English: Snippet of a menu at Hotel McAlpin from October 25, 1917, with Briarcliff Farms milk sold.
context_page_description: Briarcliff Farms was a farm established in 1890 by Walter William Law in Briarcliff Manor, a village in Westchester County, New York. One of several enterprises established by Law at the turn of the 20th century, the farm was known for its milk, butter, and cream and also produced other dairy products, American Beauty roses, bottled water, and print media. At its height, the farm was one of the largest dairy operations in the Northeastern United States, operating about 8,000 acres with over 1,000 Jersey cattle. In 1907, the farm moved to Pine Plains in New York's Dutchess County, and it was purchased by New York banker Oakleigh Thorne in 1918, who developed it into an Angus cattle farm. After Thorne's death in 1948, the farm changed hands several times; in 1968 it became Stockbriar Farm, a beef feeding operation. Stockbriar sold the farmland to its current owners in 1979.
  The farm combined a practical American business model with the concept of a European country seat or manor, with cows being milked constantly, and with milk promptly chilled and bottled within five minutes, and shipped to stores in New York City each night.
context_section_description: At its peak, the farm delivered milk to areas from Albany to New York City. After it was cooled, the milk was brought daily to the dairy-processing building, where it was poured into a large, sterilized tank and forced—with compressed air at 160 US quarts (150,000 ml) per minute—through sterilized pipes to the building's second floor. There the milk was cooled, strained five times and bottled. The bottles were sealed with parchment circles with the supervising commission's certification and the date, and then put in boxes with ice. The entire process, from entering the building to bottling, took five minutes. Every utensil contacting the milk (or workers) would be regularly sterilized with live steam. The building was as free of bacteria as the farm could make it; its rooms had white-tiled walls and floors, with coving (concave tiling) between the walls and floors for better cleaning. Milk bottles were reused after several cleanings with rotating wire brushes and two hours of heat sterilization.
  The farm's products were packaged as milk, cream, butter or kumyss, and sent every night on the New York and Putnam Railroad to New York City for delivery the next day; they were also sold in the farm's stores or from wagons. Briarcliff Farms had three stores in New York City and stores in Greenwich, Connecticut, Yonkers, Dobbs Ferry and Tarrytown. The farm's first New York City store was in Manhattan's Windsor Arcade, at Fifth Avenue and 46th Street, and it had an office in the Seymour Building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. The office produced advertisements for the New-York Tribune, The New York Times, New York Evening Post and the Mail and Express (papers which, according to Printers' Ink, advertised to wealthy residents). The farm's stores sold Briarcliff dairy products and table water. Milk was sent to the Hotel Lorraine, the St. Regis, the Waldorf Astoria, Mendel's Lunch Room at Grand Central Station and Milhau's Drug Store on Broadway, and kumyss was sent to seventeen New York City drugstores. Milk was sold to stores in New York free on board for $0.084 ($2.3 in 2019) per quart. The farm also supplied the Briarcliff Lodge with cream, milk, butter, eggs and vegetables. It shipped its products in zinc-lined cases on ocean-going steamers and shipped nationwide every day except Sunday (shipping a double order on Saturday). The farm's milk was processed into milk, cheese, butter or buttermilk at its Barn A creamery in Pine Plains, and packaged for its 101-mile (200 km) rail shipment to New York City.
caption: Part of a Hotel McAlpin menu from 1917, with Briarcliff Farms milk offered by the bottle
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