Jim Moore of Glen Arbor brings with him a special talent of brewing homemade beer and has an interesting background as well.
“Once you start drinking (quality) beer rather than a can of beer ... (A can) just doesn’t have the body or the taste that these beers do.”
Every month, Moore brews roughly a keg of beer with a few different varieties.
“When you first come off regular beer it’s a bit strong … I’ve been experimenting with a lot of different hops to get the aroma and the taste.”
Moore, who grew up in Canada, and was born in Detroit, and before moving to the Great Lakes State remembers when his dad Jim Moore Sr., would give him some beer after playing hockey all day.
“It was either whiskey or beer. When you get hurt, it is whiskey,” Moore said. “He would always give me a shell of beer.”
Even though his professional hockey dreams never came to fruition, things turned out OK for the former bruiser.
Moore was a chemical engineer for various oil and plastic companies throughout his professional career. He started out at Gulf Oil, which no longer exists, then moved over to Amoco Oil for 22 years before they were bought out by BP. Moore went to work for plastic manufacturing and power generation companies before ultimately making his way back to the oil industry.
“I worked hard to solve their (environmental) problems, and then retired,” Moore said.
Moore found his love for brewing beer while working in the Middle East where the only place to get alcohol was at private clubs for Americans or brewing it themselves.
“I learned how to do it working with all these guys. We would brew our own beer, and then of course, I couldn’t bring all my gear back, so you sell it to the next guy that’s coming over for your stint. Then I dropped it for a long time, and now I’m back into it.”
The issue of making beer in the Middle East was gathering the materials and shipping. Instead of grains, they would use beer extract, which is not much of anything other than a fine powder.
“(Brewing) reminds me of being back in the oil fields … You would be sitting there in the middle of nowhere and it’s like, ‘well, what are we gonna do tonight?’ We always would go drink beer and bull----.”
Moore was stationed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and on both coasts at oil refineries. After graduating from Michigan State and Wayne State University, Moore got an opportunity to work for oil companies and had exposure to some of the world’s best technology and biggest infrastructure projects.
Moore remembers sitting in an air conditioned trailer in the desert when the building started to shake.
“I’m sitting there and the whole container’s kind of moving a little bit ... What the hell is the deal? I go out there and it’s just a camel scratching his back on the building,” he said. “I’d highly recommend that job to any kid. They give you so much exposure to the world as well as technology and huge projects.”
While working at the Whiting Refinery in Indiana, Moore was the head of environmental safety and health, dealing with one of the largest refineries in the world that features a full-slate of products and produce 420,000 barrels a day. Moore would manage the wastewater treatment plant, which would discharge in Lake Michigan.
“You had to make damn sure (the water was clean) … Those guys in the refinery, there were like 50 units and they were loose. I would have to deal with all of it at the end of the line,” he said. “ ... Some big projects for sure. We never violated … When you get a rainstorm, you get a hundred million gallons you’re putting through the plant. That’s a lot. You learn all of the chemistry and all of the physical attributes of equipment and the plant.”
Brewing beer on the chemistry end is a lot easier than managing a wastewater plant.
“You just play around with (brewing) and have fun with beer and chemistry,” Moore said.
When Moore isn’t working at the Homestead, or being on the board at Woodstone Condominium Association, and at Hawks Nest Condo Association, he is focused on making beer a couple days of the week.
Some of his flagship beers are Belgian Teef, Stargate Pilsner, and a Moose Drol (lager) Moore has a homemade beer setup that costs roughly $1,000, but it may cost as low as $600 for the “average Joe” to get started. Moore gets some of his ingredients and equipment mainly from Fresh Coast Brewery in Traverse City.
“It’s a great little bar,” Moore said. “Then you go down and you buy a kit from them and you select one of the recipes that you like. It’s a kit that can range anywhere from like 40-to-70 bucks. The more sugar, the more extract, the more expensive it is.”
Even though Moore has the chemistry experience he does like to take the lazy route when brewing the beer with extract, which is similar to steeping when making tea. Moore adds malt extract and hops followed by fermenting, aging, then enjoyment.
“What is the most fun is when the neighbors come around, I see them and they’ll sit down and drink. The keg I’ve got, you can grab a CO2 cylinder and go over to a party,” he said. “I just sit there and everybody comes over and says, ‘I will try.’ And I just used up a keg one at a time …. you enjoy seeing people.”
Moore made his way to the peninsula thanks to his wife Deborah, and many vacations over 25 years.
Moore is proud of his three grown daughters, twins Carolyn and Kristen, and the oldest, Catherine. In the future, Moore wants to brew a little more and is always looking for opportunities to help with that endeavor.
