In Upstate New York in the early 2010s, a couple of brothers-in-law dabbled in homebrewing, making beer for family and friends. Mortalis Brewing Co-Founders Paul Grenier and Dave Luckenbach hung out quite a bit as their wives, who are sisters, would spend a lot of time together.
“We were looking for something to do,” Grenier says. “Dave was like, ‘Hey, I brewed beer once,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, that sounds good.’ So we brewed our first batch of beer.”
Note to aspiring brewers—try not to consume a lot of beer while you embark on brewing for the first time. Like Grenier and Luckenbach, who admitted that day they had a few too many Dogfish Head Olde Schools—a 15% ABV barleywine.
“We forgot to crush the grains on our first beer,” Grenier says. “So we brewed it, and it was about a 1% ABV beer, and it tasted god awful.”
Lesson learned.
So, the second time they brewed, Grenier said, “You know what? We should probably be sober and try to do this the right way,” Following a Belgian tripel kit, Grenier and Luckenbach brewed, bottled, conditioned, and waited two weeks for it to ferment. “It was absolutely incredible,” says Grenier.
That’s what it took for the pair to push all their chips to the center of the table. They ditched the bottles, got a five-tap kegerator, and brewed hundreds and hundreds of beers over the next five or so years.
With the drastic temperature shifts in Rochester, New York, they would brew in the garage in the summer and the basement during the winter. Word got out about Grenier and Luckenbach’s brews, and something funny happened.
“We had people coming over that we didn’t necessarily know,” Grenier says. “Friends would show up, and then they would invite their other friends. There would be a knock at the door, and I’m like, I don’t even know a few of these people. They’re all hanging out in my basement, drinking the beer right on draft.”
Grenier adds, “It just sort of turned into this weird Rochester kind of vibe where lots of people were showing up.”
From basements to breweries, the homebrewing-turned-pro brothers-in-law of Mortalis Brewing have never looked back.
Mortalis Wins a Business Contest Without Sharing One Beer
Grenier and Luckenbach got their big break in early 2018 when Luckenbach found a business plan contest for Livingston County.
“It was: Write a business plan, and [the county is] going to award a little bit of seed money and a small grant to the winner solely based upon their business plan,” Grenier says. The duo won, earning some cash to funnel into the brewery.
The funny part to Grenier and Luckenbach—who at the time were calling their product My Kind of Beer, or MKB—was that no one had tried their beer beyond the friends and strangers in Grenier’s basement. So they launched a marketing campaign to get the word out, bottling their beer and driving it to anyone around Rochester who wanted it.
“All they had to do was just reach out on Facebook. No charge, totally free,” Grenier says. “Just give us some honest-to-goodness feedback.”
He adds, “We started building a bit of a cult following.”
When it came to building a brick-and-mortar, the rules of the business plan contest Mortalis won stipulated the brewery had to be located in Livingston County.
“We looked at everything from renovated factories to haunted buildings,” Grenier says. “Finally, we all agreed that we wanted a blank slate for the build-out versus having to do a lot of repairs or renovations.”
They found the perfect property in Avon.
Drawing on the collective backgrounds of their partners and friends, Grenier and Luckenbach started to grow the project.
Grenier comes from project management and drew up a solid plan. Luckenbach comes from construction, where he played a part in building large shopping malls.
“We took a little bit of everything that we and the rest of our teammates knew, and we built this place ourselves,” Luckenbach says.
Grenier puts everything in perspective: “The build was pretty extreme because we started with just a box in the middle of a cornfield. We built out the grain room, the cold room, everything.”
Luckenbach’s wife worked at a lumber yard, so they acquired all the necessary lumber at cost—“still a lot of money to spend,” he says—and then other partners rounded out the business, including a partner with an IT background setting up their network and all the electronics, and one with a legal background who helped with the New York State liquor licenses and the TTB permits.
Mortalis Connects Mortals Through Beer
About a month after the business plan contest, Grenier says they shifted the name away from My Kind of Beer to Mortalis.
“We were just brewing all the stuff we wanted to drink [at the beginning],” Luckenbach says. “But now it’s—well, it’s also been about human connection and bringing people together, like the complete strangers that would come over here and drink in the basement.”
Grenier echoes Luckenbach, saying you could talk with anyone sitting around having a pint.
“That human connection that Dave talks about, it’s a weird thing,” Grenier says. “When you have a beer or two, you kind of drop your guard a little bit. You can be a little bit more human. … And, you really get to see that person for who they are.”
Grenier adds, “You might share something with somebody over a beer that you might not elsewhere in any other aspects of your life, like over a coffee or dinner. It lowers the inhibitions just a little bit to pierce the veil to see who the person truly is.”
Thinking of the connections made, whether in the basement over some homebrew or standing in a line for Tree House releases, it became clear that MKB didn’t represent the brewery.
“Mortalis is the Latin word for mortal, and we are all mortals,” Grenier says. “So it kind of felt right naming the brewery.”
We’re Gonna Need More Crowlers, STAT!
On day one, Grenier and Luckenbach just hoped to sell a little beer.
“At the end of the process, right before you open, you’re dead broke,” Grenier says. “I mean, dead broke. You’ve been eating ramen for the last like month, and that’s a good day.”
Grenier adds, “So we were like, just please buy our beer.”
They spent seven or eight hours filling crowlers the day before the opening. At the time, that came after working an eight- to ten-hour shift at their day jobs. They filled upward of five hundred 32oz crowlers and hoped for the best.
“When we opened the doors, we had a line out the door, which was incredible,” says Grenier, noting they opted not to cap the number of crowlers people could buy per transaction. “And then people started buying twelve, fourteen crowlers at a clip. We ran out the very next day.”
Grenier adds, “And we were like, ‘Oh [s**t]. I guess we should have put a limit on that!’”
At Mortalis, It’s Big Beers, Big Flavor
Today, most folks know Mortalis for its kooky, packed-to-the-gills smoothie sours and intense imperial stouts. But before Mortalis, Grenier and Luckenbach focused on brewing more traditional styles of beers like dunkels, cream ales, red ales, IPAs—notably New England IPAs—and pretty much anything they enjoyed drinking. Grenier says the traditional styles were a great jumping point for getting their feet wet and learning how to brew. But they kept going back to New England IPAs.
“We just loved the New England DIPA so much and hated making the drive to Tree House, Trillium, and Other Half every month,” Grenier says, harkening back to the pre-brewery days. “So, we really wanted to learn to brew that style. After we worked super hard on that, the sky was the limit, and creativity really started flowing into imperial stouts and fruited sours.”
Mortalis brewed a 4.5% ABV cream ale as their first batch on the commercial brew system. As Grenier puts it, “We’re from Rochester, N.Y. [home of Genesee, the maker of the iconic cream ale], so if you don’t brew a cream ale straight out of the gate, I don’t know who you are!” Once they banged that out, Mortalis turned it up a notch, making As Above So Below, a 10% ABV imperial stout.
As Above So Below was originally brewed by one of Mortalis’ owners Josh Bauerlein as a home brew. According to Grenier, Bauerlein used his favorite coffee from a local roaster and has always been in love with the imperial stout style.
“It only seemed right that we brew that as our second beer on our system,” Grenier says. “And we have been using that exact same coffee ever since.”
Luckenbach adds, “We’re very well known for that beer. We brew it at least four times a year.”
Mortalis has embraced big stouts and added fruited sours to their repertoire. In fact, it’s their bread and butter. And they treat it as such.
“We brewed our first smoothie style as professional brewers on Dec. 26, 2018. It was Hydra | Passion Fruit + Mango + Peach,” Grenier recalls. “We released it to the public very early in January 2019. We knew when we tried it that it was something very special.”
Grenier says they fell in love with the style and customers really seemed to enjoy the flavor combinations.
“Getting the right synergy of those flavors was such an awesome experience and it felt like we were on the edge of something crazy,” Grenier remembers. “Watching someone try that style for the first time, seeing their eyes light up, we just fell in love with that magic and have not looked back.”
They take their fruit procuring very seriously. Much like brewers rubbing hops to determine the best lot for their respective brewery, Mortalis does the same for their fruit selection.
“We were doing that [selection process] with fruit way before anybody was screwing around with that stuff,” says Grenier, who notes that at one point, Mortalis had about a dozen different fruit suppliers. “Because when you want the raspberry that tastes like fruit roll up, you don’t want to get the raspberry that tastes like the beginning of summer, which is very, very tart.”
Grenier says that the intentional selection of fruit separates them from other breweries producing similar beer styles.
“A lot of people were using products we would definitely not want to use,” Grenier adds. “And we’re very adamant about that and very, very, very selective and rigorous about the decisions we made.”
Which is why Grenier considers Mortalis’ Hydra series of smoothie sours amongst the beers he is proudest to have made. And the people agree. Just check the Untappd ratings on these beers. Mortalis has either made or collaborated on eleven of the top twenty beers in Untappd’s top-rated smoothie sours. The majority of those sours are in the Hydra series.
“Being able to grab those flavors and combine them together in such unique ways,” Grenier says, “like the way that certain fruits play with each other is just astoundingly impressive.”
One of those top-rated sours, Cerberus, is among Luckenbach’s favorites.
“Cerberus was created to really blur the lines between beer and fruit,” Grenier says. “We wanted to create the berries and cream experience in beer form. Utilizing raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, and a literal mountain of mini marshmallows, [the ones you put in your hot chocolate], it blended together to create summertime in a glass for us.”
Luckenbach says he has a soft spot for a few other Mortalis offerings, including the Barrel Aged imperial stout Leto. And Grenier leans towards their Zeus double IPA.
More Space, Please
Last month, Mortalis celebrated its sixth anniversary. And while they are still brewing on their initial five-barrel brewhouse—with two five-barrel, six ten-barrel, and four twenty-barrel fermenters—they have grown to distribute in twenty states and eighteen countries.
“We aren’t all in there at once, but we try to get the product to as many people as possible,” Grenier says. “Getting our beer to a bigger audience has been a dream.”
Mortalis cranks out around three thousand barrels of beer annually in their little five-barrel system. And with the brewery open to the public Thursday through Sunday, they only have three days to brew.
“So we’re doing ten turns on a five-barrel brewhouse in three days,” Luckenbach says.
When the lights are off, and no one is watching, these guys work hard.
“Lots of people think that we’re bigger than we actually are,” Grenier says. “We just use [our brew system] around the clock, like all the time, and it’s challenging.”
So, Mortalis’s plan to keep up with the immense demand is simple.
“Hopefully, a bigger brew house is in our future,” Grenier says. “[That] would be incredible.”
