They started like so many great bad ideas do: two brothers-in-law, a five-tap kegerator, Rochester weather ping-ponging between garage heat and basement frost, and a rumor mill that turned their house pours into a neighborhood pilgrimage. Paul Grenier and Dave Luckenbach brewed “hundreds and hundreds” of batches, the crowd grew from friends to friends-of-friends, and one day the basement looked less like a hobby and more like a calling.
In early 2018, they shoved all the chips in. A Livingston County business-plan contest gave them seed money (before half the judges had even tasted the beer), they dropped the placeholder name “MKB,” and chose Mortalis—Latin for “mortal”—because this was about people and pints and the weird human magic of dropping your guard over a beer. They built the Avon, NY brewery with their own hands—grain room, cold room, the whole box-in-a-cornfield turned temple—drawing on a crew whose day jobs ran from construction to IT to law.
They opened Mortalis Brewing in August 2018 and got mobbed—five hundred crowlers filled the night before, gone the next day, lesson learned. First off the new system was a nod to Rochester DNA: a 4.5% cream ale. Then they punched the throttle with As Above So Below, a 10% imperial stout born from Mortalis brewer Josh Bauerlein’s homebrew. And right after Christmas that year came the shift that rewired their destiny: Hydra | Passion Fruit + Mango + Peach, their first smoothie sour, with a public release in early January 2019. Eyes widened, lines formed, and the Hydra mythology began.
Mortalis didn’t just toss fruit into beer; they auditioned it. Like brewers “rubbing” hop lots, they selected fruit for exact character—fruit-roll-up raspberries when they wanted candy, early-summer tartness when they wanted snap. The Hydra series became their banner: top-rated smoothie/pastry sours on Untappd, collaborations everywhere, berries-and-cream illusions, and marshmallow mountains that blurred the line between beer and sorcery.
All the while they ran a tiny, tireless engine: a five-barrel brewhouse, two 5-bbl, six 10-bbl, and four 20-bbl fermenters, pushing approximately 3,000 barrels a year by brewing around the clock when the lights were off in the taproom—ten turns in three days, open Thursday to Sunday, distributing to 20 states and 18 countries because demand wouldn’t sit still. “Hopefully, a bigger brewhouse is in our future,” they said, already halfway to next week.
Then they aimed west—not to another state, but down the Thruway: a Buffalo taproom at 1250 Niagara St. opened in October 2023, a second stage for the Hydra to strut, a nearer portal for Western New York drinkers who’d been chasing cans across counties
And that brings us to today. Mortalis has never been about playing it safe; it’s about pushing fruit to its limits, swaggering into mythology, and then snapping back with stouts and IPAs that prove they can crush the “serious” beers too. This flight is the arc of that vision: tiki cocktails with hops, hydras unleashed, hops that whisper strange philosophies, and stouts that hug you into the cosmos. Each pour is a reminder of what happens when mortals build their own pantheon—one taster glass at a time.
Peaks & Pints Mortalis Beer Flight
Mortalis Brewing Boat Drinks V
6% ABV | Smoothie Sour / Pastry (with Swiftwater Brewing)
Picture a tropical hangover in a can. Boat Drinks V is the fifth glorious chapter of Mortalis’s Mai Tia–inspired series, brewed in cahoots with Swiftwater Brewing. It’s a sunlit cocktail boiled into a sour ale: pineapple, orange, lime, and orgeat syrup blended until they forgot their proper names and just started partying. The nose hits with marzipan swagger, and the sip? A tidal wave of tropical fruit that dares you not to go back in for another rush. As Mortalis likes to say—“Goonies never say die!”
Mortalis Hydra (Black Currant + Pineapple + Mango)
7% ABV | Fruited Sour
Behold the myth made liquid: Mortalis’s Hydra isn’t just a sour, it’s a snarling, many-headed beast of fruit. Mango struts in first, dripping gold like some tropical idol; pineapple dives after with its sharp, citric blade; and black currant growls from beneath, dark and tart, yanking the whole thing back from smoothie-shop frivolity into something with teeth. It’s luscious, yes, like melted gelato at the gates of Olympus, but also balanced in a way that feels almost dangerous, as if you’ve tricked the beast into letting you sip from its bloodstream. One mouthful and you’re in the mythology, sweet and sour locked in eternal combat, and you’re smiling because the fight is glorious.
Mortalis Strange Philosophies (Exploration Series: Citra + Mosaic + Citra Terp Sauce + NZH 104)
8% ABV | Imperial New England IPA
This is a beaker of hop exploration, a haze-saturated sermon in citrus and pine. Citra and Mosaic mingle, layered with terp sauce richness and exotic NZH 104’s cunning spice. It’s the lab coat of beer—smart, audacious, and always pushing the lecture deep into the juiciest things we’ve ever tasted.
Mortalis As Above So Below
10% ABV | Imperial Coffee Stout
Imagine midnight itself pressed into a taster glass and then caffeinated to hell and back. As Above So Below isn’t so much brewed as conjured by brewer Josh Bauerlein: local coffee beans slow-danced in the fermenter until every last chocolate oil, roasted secret, and nutty ember melted into the malt like some ancient alchemist’s ritual. It pours like black silk trimmed with burnt toffee, swirling with brownie batter decadence, pecan praline, and the faintest cinnamon hush. Coffee finishes the act with a long, dry wink, as if to remind you that heaven and earth share the same flavor when you’re bold enough to blur them.
Mortalis Achlys
10% ABV | Imperial Stout
Imagine if dessert itself decided to slip into something dark and silky, then whisper Greek mythologies into your ear while drizzling chocolate ganache straight down your spine. Achlys — named for the ancient spirit of sorrow and death-mist — isn’t here to comfort, it’s here to seduce. Thick as midnight oil, laced with cacao, vanilla, and graham cracker crumble, this stout drinks like a cream cheese brownie dropped straight into the abyss and set aflame with bourboned candlelight. Each sip is a decadent funeral dirge for restraint, a lush hymn to the sweet, the heavy, the utterly unapologetic. Mortalis didn’t brew a beer here so much as conjure a ritual, and you’re happily the one being sacrificed on its altar of fudge.
LINK: Peaks & Pints beer and cider cooler inventory
