Some days I love the internet. Just yesterday I posted the entry about “Some Krumbach Family History” and this morning I received an email from K. Jacob Ruppert, the great-great grandson of the Jacob Ruppert, Sr. who founded the Jacob Ruppert Brewery. How cool is that? He emailed me to tell me he saw my blog. He’s writing a book about his family history and so has a few filters that send him newsclips (and blogclips!) when keywords pop up, and my blog entry ended up in his inbox.
Aside from the nice things he had to say and the delight in connecting with someone whose family had crossed paths with his in the past, he had some comments about the brewery. Apparently my sources online misled me (big surprise), the brewery didn’t go out of business during prohibition! In fact, it survived and in 1965 it was sold to a brewery that is still in business in NYC! But here, in his own words:
However, your lovely testament requires one small correction. Prohibition did not close the Jacob Ruppert Brewery. Yes, production of regular beer stopped but our (and many other) breweries made “near-beer,” a concoction of beer that was below the Prohibition threshold of .05% alcohol. We also used our plants to make syrup and syrup by-products as well as soda water bottling. The goal was to not only make enough profit to keep the business running, but to maintain the employment of the hundreds of workers. Fortunately, our family owned the New York Yankees at the time (1912-1945) and the same decade of Prohibition was the same as the Golden Years of Baseball. The crowds at Yankee Stadium kept the near-beer flowing and its workers employed.
After Prohibition, the brewery reopened and business was as usual, but the quantity of brew made decreased as a whole generation grew up without beer. Hard liquors and cocktails flourished during Prohibition as they were easily transportable to the thousands of “speak easy” establishments. Beer was bulky and had to be kept refrigerated which made its production and transportation considerably conspicuous.
Nonetheless, The Jacob Ruppert Brewery thrived until our family sold to the Reingold Brewery in 1965.
I did a google search and found RheingoldBeer.com – which I expect is the place. They still exist! Too bad their website is broken in a bunch of places. So cool. I’ll have to get my hands on some of their beer sometime.