When a business has Santa visits with kids and Christmas tree sales at one end of a building, and a working distillery with a bar and house-made vodka at the other, that business may have something unique.
Yet for Bellewood Farms in Lynden, the combination is simply the logical extension of a company with the apple at its core.
Bellewood Farms — officially, Bellewood Acres, Inc. — is a much bigger operation than its highly visible red Farmstore at 6140 Guide Meridian Road might suggest. The family business includes what its website describes as the largest apple orchard in Western Washington on 62 total acres of farmland with apple and pear trees in Lynden and Ferndale.
What comes from the orchard, according to the company, is a harvest of more than 1.7 million pounds of apples each year. Not just whole fruit that shows up for sale in grocers like Haggen. But apples that later find a home in Bellewood’s apple-based distilled spirits, take-and-bake apple pies, apple cider, apple chips and other goods sold fresh in its Farmstore cafe and bakery near Ten Mile Creek.
The apple crop is primarily Honeycrisp, but nearly two dozen varieties are grown.
“While they never hit the markets, we have several ‘heirloom’ varieties that are in demand for local hard cider companies,” said Eric Abel, Bellewood president and co-owner. “Those heirloom varieties have fun old-world names like Brown Snout, Yarlington Mill, Kingston Black and Mountain Rose.”
Products aside — Abel estimated Bellewood has more than 50 of its own — he said the business, and the 15,000-square-foot Farmstore, have a purpose that’s deeper than sales.
“It’s a great place for us to showcase our products, but it also is a great place for education for the community,” he said. “A lot of people like to bring their kids here to teach their kids on where their food comes from and the apples just don’t grow at the grocery store. They can actually walk out to the orchard.”
Newer products with local roots
Abel, his wife Julie and son Blake bought Bellewood Acres in 2018 from John and Dorie Belisle, who founded the business and began planting the orchards in 1996. Eric said the Abels changed the public-facing name to Bellewood Farms, “as it more accurately reflected our priority as a company, as being with agriculture, and our love of farming, and the freshness implied by our farm-to-table and farm-to-bottle strategy.”
Abel said Bellewood Farms now has annual revenues of $2.6 million across its four business units: Orchard, Cafe & Bakery, Distillery and Farmstore. Bellewood employs 22 people during the off-season, he said, rising to 76 employees during harvest season.
While much remains unchanged — two homes and agricultural operations, including a barn, cold storage, packing line, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) kitchen and cider pressing facility still stand on the site of the former Van Kooten dairy farm at 231 Ten Mile Road — the new owners have put their own imprint on the business.
The expansive Farmstore, perhaps what a roadside farm stand might want to grow up to be, has increased its emphasis on both Bellewood-exclusive and other local products in its food and gift sections. They include familiar names such as Trilby’s barbecue sauce, Anytime Toffee and Twin Sisters Creamery cheese.
The distillery and tasting room, with barrels stamped “Est. 2012” and said to be the first apple distillery in the state, now not only has apple-based brandy, gin and vodka, but in 2023 introduced its Applewood Smoked Bourbon Whiskey that requires two years aging. It’s a spirit Abel said is so much in demand “we can hardly make it fast enough.”
While the bourbon itself isn’t from apples — Abel said Bellewood uses Skagit Valley corn and grains — it does use applewood pruned from the orchard for smoking. It’s also the most expensive spirit Bellewood sells, at $63 per bottle; tasting reveals the 100-proof contents are smooth with only a hint of bite and a long, gentle smoky finish.
Bellewood also released its own peppermint schnapps in late 2023. Abel said up next will be a barrel-aged rum, bottled and available in November.
Some newer product ideas have been spurred by customers. Such as one who noted that being located in the Dutch heritage community of Lynden, Bellewood should have Dutch apple pie.
“So we created a crumbly top to our apple pie,” Abel said. “People love the Dutch pie. It’s our number one seller.”
Drawing agritourists, selling private label
Bellewood’s reach goes far beyond the Farmstore and the acres of orchards. In addition to selling apples to local hard cider makers like Bellingham’s Lost Giants, it also presses apples for cideries who don’t have their own equipment. The farm’s own fresh cider is so popular (with a formula Abel calls “two reds and a green”) that it’s sold under private label by a couple of grocery retailers.
When asked if the stores are names most shoppers would recognize, Abel simply replied, “People in Seattle might.”
The Farmstore itself is a draw for tourists from Seattle to British Columbia. Bellewood attracts visitors, in part, with a year-round series of events, many of them free, such as summer Farmtunes on Friday nights, a Father’s Day car show, Easter and Christmas holiday family activities including Easter Bunny and Santa photo ops and a late fall Ciderfest.
Abel, who was a corporate marketer before becoming a farm owner, also gets the word out to tourists by having small bottles of its vodkas in the rooms of Hotel Bellwether and providing a discount to guests at the WorldMark timeshare resort in Birch Bay.
A deeper meaning for farming
Underlying Bellewood’s evolution and growth is a set of values that Abel summed up as “humility, innovation and excellence.” In conversation, Abel kept returning to what might best be described as a philosophy of food, highlighting its importance in community, faith and relationships. He spoke about how local farming — and knowing where food comes from — contributes to the richness of life, not just agricultural revenue.
Bellewood, he said, is about that. And it’s a perspective that appears to tie back to the farm’s origins.
Dorie Belisle, co-founder of Bellewood and now retired in Bellingham, said she and her husband John felt called to agriculture after seeing farming disappear where they used to live in parts of Wisconsin and Florida. Over more than two decades of Bellewood ownership and changes in approach, she said, the two of them were “most proud of the fact that it became a community farm.”
Dorie said when John’s health began to fail in 2016, they knew it was time to sell and worked closely with the Abels during a monthslong transition period.
“We were just super excited that a family that was multi-generational wanted it,” she said. “Because our goal was to have a community farm and to keep it ag forever.”
The former owner is still a customer, citing the apples, the cider and Bellewood’s apple-adjacent honey-roasted peanut butter.
“I don’t think there’s a product that they make that I don’t love and don’t share with my family and friends,” she said.
Eyes on adding more acreage
Right now, the harvest season is imminent. August’s focus, Abel said, is on hiring. Then Labor Day weekend marks the start of U-pick apples, followed by the opening of the pumpkin patch in October. That’s “when it gets really busy,” he said. He estimated Bellewood Farms sees well over 100,000 visitors a year.
Looking ahead one to three years, Bellewood has no shortage of growth plans. Abel’s list includes adding more acreage to the orchards, improving the website’s e-commerce capabilities for greater national distribution, increasing the production and distribution of fresh cider and releasing more products at wholesale to retail stores.
Beyond that?
“I think someday we would like to go into hard cider. It’s kind of a natural thing for us,” Abel said. “There are a lot of good cideries in town so it would be hard to come up with something that is as good as what’s already here. But we think we can do it with our background in the area of distilling.”
Frank Catalano writes about business and related topics for CDN; reach him at frankcatalano@cascadiadaily.com.
