Inside the Rohrbach Brewing handoff

This story is a joint publication partnership between the Rochester Beacon and the Cleveland Prost.

In March, when I broke the news of Joel and Nathan Will buying Rohrbach Brewing from founders John and Patty Urlaub, I promised I’d sit down with the brothers once the dust settled. It took a while to get them in the same room—Nathan works in Texas, after all—but it was worth the wait. What followed was a couple of hours talking about succession planning, family dynamics, the economics of running a brewery in 2026, and why the brothers think Rohrbach is positioned to keep doing what it’s done for the last 35 years.

The split is straightforward on paper: Joel Will, 37, is president and chief operating officer, and he’s the one who’ll be at the brewery every day, running the operation in which he’s worked nearly every job in over the last 17 years. Nathan Will, 54, is CEO, and he’s bringing three decades of executive experience across energy, finance, and real estate to the parts of the job that don’t involve pulling a shift on the brew deck.

They’re both Brockport natives, and they bought the Rohrbach Brewing from the Urlaubs, who founded it in 1991 and built it into the anchor of Rochester’s craft beer scene—the Buffalo Road brewpub opened in 1995, and the production brewery and later the Beer Hall in the Public Market District followed in 2008.

Here’s a fact that undersells itself: Joel Will has been at Rohrbach, on and off, since February 2009. He started as a server at Buffalo Road while he was still finishing his degree at SUNY Geneseo—it’s also where he met his wife, Jessica. Six months in, he became tasting manager at the new Railroad Street location, which at the time wasn’t even the Beer Hall yet. (New York didn’t let breweries sell beer by the pint in their own taprooms until a 2014 law change, so on Public Market Saturdays, he would pour samples for free and charge people for a “tour” instead. The bar sat where the stage is now. Imagine explaining that loophole to someone today.)

From there it’s basically a brewing bildungsroman: He begged his way into a brewing job on the smaller pilot system at Buffalo Road, trained under the old head brewer for six months, did that for years, left for two years in Raleigh, N.C., came back, moved over to Railroad Street around 2022 to run the bigger 20-barrel system (as opposed to the seven-barrel setup at Buffalo Road), did that for a year or two, and then left again—this time for Mott’s in Williamson.

“I felt like the grass might be greener outside of the brewing industry,” he says, “and realized it wasn’t. And then I came back.”

That last homecoming is when the real conversation with John Urlaub started.

The slow build to a deal

Urlaub first floated retirement to his managers back in 2019. (Starting something in the basement of the German House in 1991 and having it become the thing that taught Rochester what craft beer even was—that’s not a business you walk away from casually.)

“He wasn’t ready to be done working,” Joel Will says. “He’s a busy guy and he likes working.”

Two years turned into seven.

Things got more serious right around when Joel Will was packing up for Mott’s. There was a real conversation about working something out. Then he left anyway, which—sure, seems counterproductive, but apparently that’s just how these things go sometimes.

“When I came back, we very seriously approached John about it,” he says. “When I said that me and Nathan want to talk to you about buying the company, he said, ‘Thank God, because I am actually getting to the point where I want to sell it.’”

Good timing, as it turns out—Urlaub had already started fielding offers from other interested parties, some of whom wanted to buy only part of the company, just Buffalo Road or just Railroad Street. He wasn’t interested in splitting apart a business he’d spent 35 years building as one thing.

Joel Will had his first real sit-down with Urlaub at Java’s on Gibbs Street, and—almost like he was ticking off the days, he is very precise about this—it took almost exactly a year from there to actually close.

The day before the news went public, Joel and John Will toured both locations so every employee, on every shift, heard it directly instead of from a press release. At Buffalo Road, Urlaub gathered the team for their normal shift meeting and told them the retirement rumors— were finally true.

“I keep saying that it’s not happening, it’s not happening, but it is happening,” he said. Faces tightened, by Joel Will’s telling, until Urlaub pointed at him: someone already in the room was buying the company.

“There were multiple exhales,” Joel Will says. “There was relief.”

Urlaub, for his part, framed it in the official announcement as simple business logic, though you can hear the sentiment underneath it.

“In the life cycle of every business, there comes a time to transition to a new generation of leaders like Joel and his leadership team, who can take the business to the next level,” he said at the time. “There’s not a better scenario for this transition. It’s been an honor working with our loyal partners, dedicated team members, and all the customers who have supported us throughout the years.”

Meanwhile, in the energy business

Nathan Will has had a career that has approximately nothing to do with beer until now—stretches in D.C. and central Asia, an MBA at Georgetown University, and then, in his words, delivered with an audible chuckle, “the real judicious decision to go work for Enron.” He left with everybody else during the bankruptcy and has spent the years since building a career across energy, finance, and real estate, most recently helping launch and run a natural gas export company headquartered in Houston.

“Once this decision was made, acquiring Rohrbach’s, it was all I needed mentally to make that switch,” Nathan Will says. He’s already given his notice, in a sense: He told his company’s president this year that he’s setting up what he calls “a very well-planned executive transition” for his successor.

This had been kicked around for years in one form or another—there was even a stretch where the family considered doing something in Northern Virginia instead, and Joel Will went down to Houston to look at brewing jobs there. It never stuck, because Joel had made up his mind to stay in Rochester with his family, Nathan Will says.

The actual green light happened over text. Joel Will told his brothers he didn’t want to be in the corporate world anymore and wanted back into Rohrbach full time. “I said to Joel, ‘Is this serious? Is John still interested in retiring? Then tell him we will make a deal work,’” Nathan Will recalls.

And then, the detail that makes the whole thing feel less like a corporate transaction and more like an actual family deciding something together: Nathan Will’s wife was sitting on their patio, overheard the conversation, and said, “Did you just agree to buy Rohrbach’s?” His answer, more or less: Yes, is that okay? “She was like, you’ve talked about it for long enough.”

Why this particular split works

I asked how the two of them see their skill sets fitting together. Joel Will has the hands-on side covered—front of house, back of house, the brewing floor—after nearly two decades of doing most of those jobs himself at one point or another. Nathan Will brings large-scale operational and financial experience from outside the industry instead, and he was upfront that he has no interest in managing day-to-day operations.

“This is a hands-on business. And it is a production business. We intend to grow it,” Nathan Will says. “Just seeing it in person, the amount of things you have to wrap your head around—I know this just from the energy production business, there is really no end to it. You can’t do that from a distance.”

He sees some upside in being a step removed—he doesn’t have to carry the daily operational baggage, because Joel is there for that, and he already has the team’s respect.

“I am hoping he’s going to be a check,” Nathan Will says, “both with regard to this business and just the market in general.”

“Realistic negativity,” Joel Will adds, laughing.

That trust runs both directions. Joel is blunt about where it comes from: “I am beyond grateful to John and Patty for the years of mentorship that have led to this moment.”

On buying a brewery when the industry is, let’s say, not in a boom period

I asked if this felt like a scary time to be buying into craft beer, given how many breweries have closed in the last few years.

“I would be scared if we were starting a new brewery,” Joel Will says. “What’s great here is that we took over a company with a strong sales footprint. Rohrbach is in essentially every bar and restaurant in Monroe County, has a solid presence in Buffalo and Syracuse, and has an anchor relationship with Wegmans. Even if you were to choose to do nothing, to not grow, if we manage it responsibly, we are set up for success—and a lot of that is thanks to John and those who have toiled away at it for the last 15 to 30 years.”

He gave a real nod of respect to people starting breweries from scratch right now. “I hope it works out for them.”

Nathan Will brings his outside-industry lens to it: at either extreme of a business’s size, small or huge, growth has to be dramatic to survive—“either you’re grabbing enough market share to hit high single-digit growth every year, or you’re a big enough player that acquisitions stop moving the needle for you financially.” Rohrbach, in his read, sits in a workable middle. Both brothers keep circling back to the word “measured.” “You can’t outpace the market for too long,” Nathan says, “and you don’t want to outpace the ability of what you have.”

The numbers back that up: Rohrbach did about 7,000 barrels last year, Joel Will is targeting 7,500 this year, and current capacity tops out somewhere north of 10,000. (The high-water mark was 2019, a little over 9,000 barrels with real hope of cracking 10,000, right before the pandemic had other plans.)

Joel Will credits Urlaub’s patience for the cushion.

“John built the company very intentionally over the years, very slowly. At times it was frustrating, especially in that 2015-to-2019 window, when everything was ripe for breweries to grow something like 25% a year. But to do that you have to acquire debt, and John was like, ‘We’re not taking on any debt. We’re going to grow at a sustainable rate. We’re gonna pay off our mortgage.’” (Genuinely a wild thing to hear a brewery owner say out loud in 2019, but here we are, and it clearly worked.)

That discipline is also, in a roundabout way, why the brothers can afford to be a little bolder now. As the deal with the Urlaubs was getting finalized, Rohrbach bought the Young Lion brand from K2 Brothers Brewing—Nathan Will calls it a chance “to help carry forward the legacy that John and Patty built” while adding, in his words, “one of the region’s most loved and respected brands” to the Rohrbach portfolio. It’s a sign the “measured” talk doesn’t mean standing still.

The wish list

I always ask about a wish list at the end, because the answers tend to be more interesting once people stop being careful.

Joel Will’s crazier idea: “A third retail location on the east side, probably Penfield or Webster, styled roughly as a mirror image of Buffalo Road with a heavy lean into the German specialties.”

He’d also like to see Rohrbach distributed outside New York, something the brewery has genuinely never done.

“We’ve been all over the state, with the exception of New York City—I would generally just avoid that, because it’s just a different beast,” he says. Rather than creeping outward state by state (Pennsylvania next, and so on), he’s eyeing something less obvious—North Carolina, or Northern Virginia. “That, to me, is a realistic goal that we’ll be pushing for soon.”

Nathan Will, who calls himself “a Wegmans kid at heart” (he went to undergrad on a Wegmans scholarship and worked at the Chase-Pitkin in Brockport back in the day), sees an opening in markets that have both a Wegmans and a decent-sized population of Western New York expats missing their hometown beer. “It is no small thing to be Wegmans’ hometown small brewer, along with Genesee,” he says.

And then the goal that isn’t really a wild goal at all, just an honest one: “I want this business to outlive us,” Nathan Will says. “I want this brewery to be here for Rochester in 20, 30, 40 years.”

Will Cleveland is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer. A former Democrat and Chronicle reporter, he writes about beer in the Finger Lakes region and Western New York on Substack.

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