“This brewery right here is probably the most flexible and technologically capable brewery in town,” says Randy Mosher. And what’s more, since the laundry machines are on the second floor of his Rogers Park Victorian, it has the whole basement to itself.
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This setup may not sound like much, but if home brewers were ranked, Mosher would be among the best in America. British beer expert Michael Jackson has called him a home-brewing genius. Craft breweries are often structured to create relatively simple, and similar, beers, but Mosher brews a ridiculously wide range, from the modern to the obscure and extinct. The Buckapound can handle both an ultrahoppy India Pale Ale, today’s hottest style, and a hop-free gruit ale, the it beer of premodern Europe. Inside the mash kettle today are the beginnings of a sample summer pale ale for a startup brewery in Cleveland, whose owner has hired Mosher as a consultant; he’ll tap the ale at a picnic this Saturday for the annual holiday known as National Homebrew Day. Fellow Chicago brewers call Mosher’s backyard the best place in America to drink beer that afternoon. Last year, Mosher’s sixth throwing the invite-only party, about 50 people–most of them members of the Chicago Beer Society–sampled 30 different brews between morning and midnight.
Mosher calls brewing “one of those things that hooks people hard.” After only a couple of years mixing his own mash he’d started work on his first home-brewing book. While he was still chipping away at it, he moved to Chicago to take a job as an art director for a small advertising agency. Then, in 1989, he sold the rights to a device he invented called the Amazing Wheel of Beer to Charlie Finkel, a pioneering Seattle beer importer. (The wheel simplifies calculating beer’s gravity, or its density compared to water, a key brewing metric.) When Finkel asked if he had any other ideas, he was ready. His first book, The Brewer’s Companion, was published by Finkel’s press, Alephenalia, in 1991, the same year he quit his job to freelance full-time.
After a stall in the mid-90s, craft beer sales in America have taken off. Last year they rose almost 10 percent while mainstream beer sales fell. Ironically, with the increase in craft brewing, home brewing’s popularity has declined. “Home brewing begat brewing and now there’s all this beer around,” Mosher says. His latest book project, tentatively titled “Tasting Beer,” is intended as a complement to Jancis Robinson’s classic wine guide How to Taste. With it he hopes to change how beer drinkers–not just beer brewers–think about the beverage; he’s currently shopping his proposal to publishers outside of what he calls the “home brew ghetto.”
