Messorem is the microbrewery as death-metal album cover — the name is Latin for "the reaper" — and one of Quebec's most coveted hop merchants, brewing from an industrial space with a taproom (and yes, a terrasse) at 2233 rue Pitt, along the Lachine Canal in Montreal's Sud-Ouest. The origin story is pure Montreal: founders Marc-André Filion, Sébastien Chaput, and Vincent Ménard met in the early 2000s through music — Sébastien toured the world as guitarist for technical-metal outfit Ion Dissonance before becoming the numbers wizard, Vincent drummed for The Last Felony while homebrewing for a decade, then trained at Auval and Pit Caribou in Gaspésie and brewed two years at Les Trois Mousquetaires, and Marc-André, once a hardcore vocalist and now rapper with ADISQ-nominated La Carabine, studied design and became the brand's colour wizard. Starting in 2015, the three met every Friday to drink the best bottles their cellars could hold, dreaming of hazy rarities from Other Half, Grimm, and Hudson Valley without the border run — until Marc-André's father Christian Biron and his lifelong friend François Gareau, convinced by the beers and the tenacity, backed the project and the canal-side brewery came to life.
The specialty is exactly what those Friday nights craved: IPAs, sour beers, and barrel-aged creations built from the best ingredients on the market, with the stated goal of brewing beers the founders themselves want to drink — taste, mouthfeel, and appearance all precisely intended. The lineup reads like a gothic novel in cans and on draft: a parade of hazy IPAs and DIPAs (Hyperthermie, Fossoyeuse, Fauche Alerte, L'Arbre Est Dans Ses Feuilles, the 10% Temporalis triple IPA), smoothie sours like Petit Jus de Mort swirling cherry, strawberry, and blackcurrant, a Dead Sea–floating gose, the Slush Nihilisme slushy beer, and a barrel programme of French oak and bourbon casks yielding 11.9% imperial stouts like Mort Rouge — balanced, in a wink to investor Christian's lobbying, by an increasingly serious crisp side: foudre-fermented German lagers, Kellerbier, and rice lager under the Il Fut un Temps series. The taproom kitchen holds its own with a $12 double smash burger, crispy chicken and falafel sandwiches, fish and chips, popcorn-chicken poutine, Quebec-vegetable salads, and a stout brownie with ice cream, plus a curated NA fridge stocking Bellwoods' Jelly King and slush for the kids.
The reaper travels, too. Messorem's beers are now chased across borders, and its calendar reads like a touring band's: a single month can see the crew pour at festivals in Europe, run tap takeovers from a Norwegian ale house through a string of Southern California bars (Father's Office, O'Shea, The Bear Trap), and anchor festival slots at Laval's Festival des Bières, Saguenay's Bières du Monde, and the Vermont Brewers Festival.
Heavy in imagery, meticulous in the glass, and disarmingly fun in person, Messorem is what happens when metal musicians apply tour-grade discipline to hazy IPAs — a skull-branded, canal-side destination where Montreal's hop obsessives and curious passersby drink exactly the beers three friends always wished existed.