In August 1999, the Genesee Brewing Company, the last brewery standing in Rochester, New York, received an offer from Pabst, one of the largest national brewers in America, to buy its beer brands. After 67 years of unbroken family leadership, the company was losing money on the product that had made it famous, and the offer was exactly the kind of consolidation that had already erased nearly every one of its hometown rivals. The family said no, rejecting the deal largely out of loyalty to Rochester and concern for the jobs that would disappear if production moved elsewhere. It was a principled decision, but it solved nothing.
Within months, the struggling brewery cut 10 percent of its workforce, roughly 55 jobs out of a staff of 550. The road to that moment had been long. When Rochester’s beer industry peaked in 1909, the city supported nine major breweries, fed by German immigrants and the barley, wheat, and hops of the Genesee River valley. The company that would outlive them all was founded in 1878 by Matthias Kondolf, a Rochester businessman who bought a working lager brewery that had begun as a small operation in 1857 and included a saloon and bowling alley.
He reorganized it as a stock company and named it for the valley itself, borrowing from the Seneca word for the land the city sat on. By 1970, every other brewery in the city was gone. Genesee had outlasted them all. It almost never came back at all.
In 1920, Prohibition shut down the entire industry. Lewis Wehle, hired as brew master in 1916 at 27, the youngest in New York State, spent the dry years as a grocer, then founded a baking company that pioneered home delivery of fresh bread. He sold the bakery in 1929 for one million dollars, just before the stock market crash. When repeal became imminent, Wehle and his partners bought back the dormant Genesee brewery for $500,000 and renovated the idle plant.
On April 27, 1933, before national repeal was finalized, Genesee resumed shipping beer. Wehle celebrated by renting out the Powers Hotel and throwing a party for 4,000 people, one of the largest brewery repeal celebrations on record. He also launched a new flagship, 12 Horse Ale, named for a hitch of red Belgian horses pulling a red wagon from tavern to tavern. He trademarked the horse hitch itself.
The post-repeal market was crowded, with five serious competitors sharing Rochester. Over the following decades, Genesee outexecuted every one of them. Leadership passed smoothly from Lewis Wehle to his son Jack in 1964, and then to Jack’s son Ted in 1993. Under Jack’s leadership, the brewery acquired the Fred Koch Brewery in 1984, and by the 1990s, its products, including the flagship Genesee Beer, Genesee Cream Ale, and Genesee Light, were sold in 39 states.
The deepest roots were cultural. A nickname, “Jenny,” had circulated in bars for years, and in 1952 the company built an advertising campaign around it. In 1951, it began brewing a seasonal spring bock beer, which became a signal that winter was ending. Employment at the brewery became generational, with fathers and mothers passing the trade to their children.
In 1960, the company created an entirely new American style from scratch: Genesee Cream Ale, smoother and lighter than a traditional ale, brewed with ale yeast but finished cold like a lager. The style became a recognized national category, with Genesee as its reference point. None of that could protect the company from its own balance sheet. By the late 1990s, Genesee was only one piece of a larger structure called Genesee Corporation, which had diversified into non-beer businesses.
In the fiscal year ending May 1999, those operations made up more than a third of the company’s total income of $178. 4 million. But the brewing division itself posted a loss of $4. 7 million, and beer sales were down 12.
5 percent. A beer company was losing money on beer, propped up by businesses that had nothing to do with what made it famous. After rejecting Pabst in August 1999, the Wehle family agreed to sell to Platinum Holdings, a New York investment group, in December of that year. The deal fell through by May 2000.
Into the vacuum stepped a management group led by former president and CEO William J. Hubbard, who arranged a $22 million buyout that was completed by December 2000. The company emerged as High Falls Brewing Company, named for the waterfall at the brewery’s Rochester location. The Genesee name was retired from the corporate letterhead.
Ted Wehle, who had succeeded his father as chairman in 1993, died in his early 50s after a battle with cancer, closing out four consecutive generations of family leadership that had run unbroken for 67 years. The brewery came closer to the end than it ever had before. Bill Gurgley, who started working at the Rochester brewery in 2001, later recalled that the state’s oldest brewery had been on the brink of closing forever. An outside investor proposed shutting down brewing entirely and converting the historic campus into an ethanol production facility.
The plan did not happen. According to Gurgley, a group of employees banded together, pushed back against the liquidation proposal, and helped stabilize the company enough to keep it operating as a brewery. High Falls Brewing Company ran the show for less than a decade. In 2008, Belgian-Brazilian brewing giant InBev acquired Anheuser-Busch, and federal regulators required the merged company to sell Labatt’s U.
S. operations. In February 2009, KPS Capital Partners, a New York private equity firm, bought High Falls and merged it with Labatt USA into a single entity, North American Breweries, briefly the largest independently owned beer company in the United States. That June, the Genesee name returned as the brand’s trade name.
The name came home, but the company that owned it did not. In late 2012, North American Breweries was purchased by FIFCO, Florida Ice and Farm Company, a publicly traded beverage conglomerate headquartered in San Jose, Costa Rica, for a reported price in the hundreds of millions. In 2018, the American holding company renamed itself FIFCO USA, formalizing what had been true on paper since 2012. The brewery on the Genesee River has never stopped running since Louis Wehle reopened it in 1933.
Today it operates under FIFCO USA, producing the classic Genesee lineup alongside brands that would have been unrecognizable to its founder, including Seagram’s Escapes, Lipton Hard Iced Tea, and, since a 2024 investment, Labatt Blue and Labatt Blue Light. In 2026, Governor Kathy Hochul announced a $50 million modernization project at the facility, with new tanks, expanded packaging capacity, and up to 57 new jobs, retaining more than 500 workers. In 2028, Genesee will turn 150 years old, and it will almost certainly still be brewing beer in Rochester under whichever corporate name is on the door that year. The beer survived.
The company underneath it did not. In Rochester, people still ask for a Jenny the way they have since 1952, and the bartender never needs to ask what they mean.