There I go posting about more events when I haven’t even caught up with talking about ones that already happened! This was last Sunday.

First off, it was crowded this year! The event seems to have really taken off.

We met Bob at our house, and then met up with Nita, MJ, Ron and were surprised to meet up with Constance, David and their new baby Caylee later in the afternoon!

The weather was cool and breezy when we arrived, I was glad to have worn my sweatshirt. We got our souvenir beer glasses right when we arrived and Michael and I got them filled with the Slacker Bock – which was quite a delightful bock. Later I went with the 2006 Helles Bock, which is one of my favorite Bocks. And after that? I am not sure, Michael kept bringing Bocks around and I kept drinking from his glass! The one I do remember was the Ice Bock – which was one of the bocks that they froze and removed much of the water from – leaving a very potent brew. Good stuff, but yowza!

And the goat race? We were in line for a half hour getting some sausages to eat and didn’t get a spot to see the race, so we were out of luck. There were just so many people there! I don’t mind so much though, hanging out with friends and having some great beers was enough for me. Now pictures!

Early in the day, Michael enjoying a beer in front of the brewery

Nita and MJ – MJ is not actually unhappy! He’s just tired because he’s been running around for weeks and is about to move to CA (he even had to leave the festival early, boo)

A bunch of us huddled in for this photo: Bob, me, Ron, Nita, Constance (and Caylee attached!) and you can see a little bit of David – oh and you can see the crowd!

Michael and David

As the event started winding down we put our name in for a table for 7 and were able to have a quick dinner inside the brewery. Afterwards a bunch of us went back to our house and sat around the firepit in our back yard. There was lots of beer to be had between the growlers from Victory the night before, misc beer we had in our ‘fridge and what David and Constance brought over. I stopped with the beer thing pretty early (I think I was already feeling my cold creep up) but a few people got quite drunk and started doing crazy things like pouring out their heart or singing the theme from Firefly (I’m not naming names!). What a night. What a day!

Oh and speaking of growlers from Victory, we took a couple camera-phone pictures while we on the brewery tour the day before, our favorite of which was this treasure: Michael hugging one of the aging tanks – hah!

I’m sure part of the reason I tend to get depressed in the winter is that I don’t get out much. I seem to have more plans in the spring and summer than at any other time of the year. Today I just booked my last free weekend in June! These are mostly local things, and we’re always looking for people to come along, so here are the events we’ll be attending in the coming month:

Saturday, 19 May: The Gatherings Concert Series: Steve Roach (with opening by Jeffrey Koepper) – Steve Roach is huge in the ambient world, and even touches outside of it. It’s been a few years since he played in the area and they’re expecting to sell out – so if you want to come order your tickets now!

Saturday, 2 June: PA LoCo Ubuntu InstallFest – Really, people come :) You can volunteer or bring an old computer or buy a cheap old computer there and get Ubuntu installed on it!

Sunday 10, June: Bear Creek Brew Fest – We’re going with a few people, but the more the merrier at a brew fest! You get a sampler glass and go around to all the beer tables and get samples. The venue looks to be a nice one too, I’m really looking forward to this. I need to grab our tickets soon. Tickets are $25 each in advance (recommended) or $30 at the door (if they have room left) – if you want to meet us at our house and be our designated driver you can get in for just $5 :)

Saturday 16, June: The STAR’S END 30th Anniversary Spacemusic Festival – We just found out about this today and immediately bought tickets. The show will be featuring: Robert Rich + Ian Boddy, Jeff Pearce, The Ministry of Inside Things and Orbital Decay. Robert Rich is one of my favorite ambient artists who we’ve seen in concert a few times, and we saw Jeff Pearce play at the Summer Solstice Spacemusic Spectacular 3 years ago. I’ve never seen Ian Boddy in concert but I’m familiar with some of his work and he’s quite good. It’ll be the concert debut of Rich and Boddy playing together (awesome!). I’m really excited for this. The tickets were “sort of” $60 each – in that you make a pledge to become a member of XPN and get the ticket as a “gift” – fine with me, they’re worth $60 a piece and XPN has some nice member privileges.

Thursday-Sunday 21-24, June: 6th Annual GAIAN MIND SUMMER FESTIVAL – Woohoo! We went to this last year and had a blast. This year I took off from work Friday so we could leave Thursday evening and camp out for the entire event. This is going to be a lot of fun, hopefully it won’t rain too much this time! We were supposed to join some friends there but they’re unable to make it. Anyone else up for camping out with us for a weekend? The base ticket price is $110 each which gets you the campsite – this means you bring your own food and “fend for yourself” as far as food goes, we’ll be taking this route as we felt the meal tickets were a bit pricey for what you’re served ($166 gets you a campsite and food for 4 days, $149 for just friday dinner-sunday brunch). I’ll be buying our tickets pretty soon.

It’s shaping up to be a fun season.

Thursday and Friday were a bit of a challenge with this cold and the allergies, but I think the Claritin is finally starting to build up in my system so my allergy symptoms aren’t so severe. The cold just had to take care of itself, and mostly left me feeling achy those two days. I was able to work though and luckily I managed not to fall too far behind. One night this week (Wed? Thurs?) I was feeling a bit hot and miserable and Michael took me down the street to the new Rita’s for some waterice. He’s so good to me, and it hasn’t been a good week for him either – some pretty serious sinus headaches are really messing with his ability to function.

My head still wasn’t quite right when we went out yesterday evening for some dinner and to stop by Lowe’s for a new air conditioner. I was doing very absent-minded things all evening, the worst of which was ordering cookies for dessert with the intention of taking most of them home – and then leaving them on the table at the restaurant. Arrrgggg cookies! :(

The air conditioner was one that would finally be big enough to cool the upstairs living room/Michael’s office. This was an investment we have been meaning to make, it gets VERY hot up there. We needed one that was at least 15000BTU, so I did a tiny bit of research and decided upon one. Usually I do more research but I just haven’t had the time. My research was pretty much: HomeDepot site sucks, I’m not shopping there, Sears doesn’t have anything big enough in a Window unit, hey Lowes has what we want, Frigidaire is a good company, and the price is competitive. So we went with the Frigidaire 15,100 BTU Room Air Conditioner (Color: White) ENERGY STAR. It was huge and heavy. It barely fit in the Civic (we should have brought the truck!) and bringing it upstairs was a challenge. Even more of a challenge was installing it in the window. Should be pretty straight forward, right? Nah, it came with a bunch of screws and horrible instructions. It must have taken us 2 hours to figure it out and finally get it installed. We’re not dumb people! It was tough! I think the worst part is the instructions didn’t clearly tell you that the bulk of the A/C was removable from the chassis – and this is required to do some of the installation. Bleh, air conditioners. But by 10 PM last night we had it running and it cooled down the room very quickly! Michael and I slept upstairs on the new futon couches last night.

And now that I’m feeling a bit more alive than previously, I need to shower and get myself out of the house and run some errands I’ve put off while I was sick.

Monday I wasn’t feeling so hot.

Tuesday I felt so lousy I called out sick to work.

Today I feel bad too. My cough is worse (which makes my head hurt), I’m more achey and all around miserable. Michael suggested I call the doctor.

I don’t go to the doctor much, afterall “it’s just a cold” – but I am feeling pretty miserable, and this is the second cold I’ve had in about 3 months. So I got an appointment for 9:30 this morning. I saw a new doctor, one who is covered under my current medical plan. He was great (that’s rare, I will make sure I see him next time too). After an exam I felt was thorough and a zillion questions he pronounced that I have “a cold aggravated by allergies.” And I should “get some sleep for the cold, and take these allergy medicines for the allergies.” Oh good.

I’m going to take his advice about the cold now and get some more sleep.

So, beer things. First off, my grandmother emailed me about my post about her father-in-law working in the Ruppert Brewery (it’s the post that wouldn’t end!). She emailed to share information about my great-grandfather’s situation back then, and had this to say:

“I just read your journal and read about Ruppert Beer. I caught that error in your research that the Ruppert Co. had gone out of business during the depression. The reason I knew is that Otto always said his father always worked during the depression and that many of his relatives had not. Some of them even borrowed money from his father because he had a good job all through the depression. One of his relatives who had been a stock broker (his stepson’s wife’s father borrowed money from him). It was a very tough time and most people were unemployed. They did make “near beer” and although it didn’t have the alcohol in it really tasted quite like real beer. It really was pretty good. I think it is still made but I’m not sure about that. When Grandpop Krumbach was still working (Otto and I were married before he retired) he brought home all kinds of special beer. Once a year they made Bock Beer which was very good. I liked that although beer was not a favorite of mine.”

That’s pretty cool.

I’ve had a busy weekend. On Friday flew up from North Carolina to spend the weekend up here for the Broad Street Race. He arrived shortly after 4PM and after chilling out for a bit we all went to grab some appetizers and a beer or two up at Ortino’s Northside. I ended up with a Brooklyn East India Pale Ale that they had on tap – pretty good! They also had Dale’s Pale Ale from Oskar Blues in Colorado on tap, it was pretty mellow and it seemed like more of an amber ale than an pale, but it was good.

After Ortino’s we headed over for a nice evening of BBQ, friends and a bonfire. Met some cool people, had a lot of laughs and fun. We need to do this sort of thing more often.

Saturday morning I made blueberry pancakes and sausage before skipped out the door to meet some of his running buddies down in Philly. Michael mowed the lawn, I knocked out some much needed weeding in my gardens (godzilla dandelions!). Then I ran out to run some errands. Around 3 gave us a call, he was leaving the city and we made plans to meet up at Victory Brewing Company for the brewery tour, some dinner, and some great beer.

The tour at Victory was fun, as usual. We got to see more of the bottling line than previously, and since that’s one of my favorite parts of the tour that was fun!

Between the three of us, I got to try a bunch of Victory beers I hadn’t previously tried:

St. Boisterous Hellerbock – A bit malty for me, but a solid brew.
St. Victorious Doppelbock – Now this is what I’m talking about! A nice, dark lager that was quite spicy.
Festbier – Not bad, but it didn’t really knock my socks off.
Sunrise Weissbier – This one was too lager for me, a session beer.
Whirlwind Wit – This was a nice, spicy wheat.
Mad King’s Weisse – How did this one fly under my radar for so long? It’s amazing! Really reminded me of a saison.

I also enjoyed some of the Sapphire Bock and Golden Monkey, still as good as ever!

Unfortunately the food was lousy again. One of the new things on the menu was a Reuben. Great! Not really. It wasn’t really bad as food goes, but it’s probably the worst reuben I’ve ever had, I should have been clued in by them spelling it wrong in the menu. They put coleslaw on it instead of sauerkraut! And it wasn’t because they didn’t have sauerkraut, ordered a sausage thing and there was sauerkraut on that. The corned beef was dry and thick (very odd). The bread wasn’t toasted at all. Ugh, I still can’t get over the coleslaw.

We left Victory around 7:30 and got home before dark. Had a couple beers, watched some TV (Victory Brewing DVD and some Firefly), and then had to turn in so he could wake up at the break of dawn this morning for the race. It was a good night.

Today we’re headed out to the Sly Fox Bockfest & Goat Race – woohoo! The LJ icon I’m using on this entry was taken at the fest last year, and I look forward to getting myself another giant glass to fill with bocks! I’ve been looking forward to this festival all year, and we managed to convince some friends to come along! Nita will be meeting us here at the house in about an hour, Bob will be meeting us at the festival, and in a wonderful turn of events (for me) MJ’s flight out to CA where he is moving to was delayed so he decided to drop by the beerfest! Woohoo, we get to see him again!

I should grab a nice hearty breakfast and get myself prepared for the day.

Yesterday contractors from Janville Home Improvements came by to replace the half of our roof facing the street. It was a perfect day for it, warm, sunny. I don’t have any complaints, they were professional and ended up staying for 12 hours to complete the job. I expect we’ll be contacting them in a few years when the other half of the roof (which isn’t leaking but is getting old) needs to be done. It’s such a relief to have it completed, the leaks hadn’t gotten bad enough to do any damage to finished parts of the house, but it was only a matter of time.

No roof!

New roof!

This is mostly for Kris, because she’s my Garden Consultant – but anyone is welcome to answer. What are these flowers? I picked some last year and put them in a vase, I figured they were weeds and didn’t care because they were pretty. Kris saw the vase photo and became interested. They grow all over my yard! Here are pictures so they can be properly identified!

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.

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.

MJ, close friend of ours who attended our wedding, is moving out to California for work. It’s a great opportunity but I can’t help feeling sad that he’s leaving. Another “real life” friend turning into mostly just an “online friend” – arg :) He said we can come out and stay with him in San Francisco anytime we want though, woo! And he still has family out here so I’m sure he’ll visit from time to time.

To celebrate his new job and say goodbye we met up with him and Bob at our house on Wednesday evening and headed out to dinner at Cab Fryes. It’s an upscale place that Michael and I had never been too but came highly recommended by some friends. It’s a straight shot 14 miles up Route 29.

It really is a nice place, right up there with some of our favorite places to eat in Skippack. And it was a pretty quiet evening, the restaurant seemed to stagger their guests and not pile them all in one room when possible. They also didn’t rush us with our meal, there was an appropriate amount of time between appetizers, salads, entrees and dessert. How refreshing. The food was wonderful. We started out the meal with Mushroom Caps baked with Crabmeat and Basil Butter, Thai Dumplings in a ginger scallion Broth and a cheese platter (this platter was perhaps the only disappointment with an average smoked gouda and some other good, but bland cheese).

The salads were pretty standard house and caesar, but even they were good. Nice and fresh. And when MJ declined the anchovies on his salad the waitress brought his to me – hah! Anchovies are yummy on salad.

Dinner was wonderful. I ordered a special of red snapper and mussels..mmm. Next time I’m going to go with what Bob ordered, the Scottish Lobster – sauted with curry, pineapple, peaches, and whiskey~lobster cream, it looked so good. Michael went with the Lobster Scampi, petite Tails sautéed with Garlic and Buter which I snagged a piece of and it was good, a place in PA that doesn’t ruin lobster? Amazing! MJ went with a mushroom-crusted scallop special that I almost chose, that looked good too.

Dessert! They had some pretty impressive sounding desserts, but none like what I ordered. It was a nice thick chocolate torte with gold dust on top of it. Yowza! I ordered the last one in house, poor Bob had to order something else and then I didn’t even offer to share when I got it. I should have, I’m a bad person, I was just mesmerized by the deliciousness!

Their alcohol selection was not bad, they had some local things on it. MJ and I ordered a couple bottles of Chimay Blue, Michael went with a white wine and Bob had a stout on tap. I think we were all happy.

It was a good night, we were at the restaurant for over 2 hours and then went back to the house to hang out for a while.