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.

I’m not the type to take a lot of pride (or shame) in what my distant relatives have done. I this sheds light onto one of my only “beliefs”: that we’re born into the families we’re born into simply by chance. As such we shouldn’t take too much pride out of what our ancestors did, but instead forge our own way in life. We could have just as likely been born into a family with very few recorded accomplishments. But I am fascinated by family history and where I come from. This month I learned a lot about where I came from – and the fact that I’m only 3rd generation “American born” in at least in one vein of my family.

Back in March I received an email from JoAnn Plenge. She was responding to a journal entry I wrote back in 2003 where I mused about my possible relationship to an Elizabeth Krumbach from Nebraska who passed away in 1926. I learned that there was a whole Nebraska family of Krumbachs – one of whom was in the Nebraska state legislature, a Charles Krumbach. JoAnn is Charles’ great granddaughter. How cool is that?

JoAnn was kind enough to send a whole email detailing some of the family history so I could have a better chance at actually getting to the bottom of whether we were related. Here’s the information she gave me:

Joann’s branch of Krumbachs came as three brothers Nebraska from Eitorf, Germany in July of 1873, leaving behind their parents Erasmus and Helena Krumbach and eleven siblings (yep, fourteen children in all!). The brothers were Erasmus, John, and Charles, aged 30, 21 and 18, who came to the US to start their lives as homesteaders. When their life out there began they lived together in a sod house dug out of the side of a hill.

Her great grandfather Charles married Ida Ingalls and they had five children – JoAnn’s mother was one of them. Charles started as a farmer but later owned a hardware store in Shelby, Nebraska and even later became director of a local bank, served on the school board and became the treasurer of an insurance company. He ran for Senator and spent two terms there from 1902-1914.

John married Elizabeth Schumacher and Erasmus married Marie Benda.

JoAnn as able to visit her relatives in Eitorf, Germany and had this to say:

“My husband and I visited my third cousins, who still live in Eitorf (a charming little town east of Bonn) in 2001. The original Krumbach home with its many out buildings including stables, a meat curing building, chicken coop, blacksmith shop, etc. is still being lived in by my third cousin Detlef and his wife. According to my third cousins, the brothers left Germany to seek better economic opportunites in the U.S. and to avoid what was then mandatory military service in the Prussian army. The German Krumbach family were devout Catholics, but my great grandfather eventually converted to the Protestant Methodist faith (probably when he got married).

Wow!

I don’t know much about family history, so I dropped a line to my Aunt Elaine to see if any of her information could be matched up with this. She replied with a great email that started out saying that there doesn’t seem to be a close connection, but it’s possible. The email continued to give some very interesting information I didn’t know about.

Before coming to the United States, my family of Krumbachs were living in Cervinka, Yugoslavia, having emigrated there from the Bavarian part of Germany sometime around the mid 1800s when the Franz Joseph canal was being built. They were a middle class family that was relatively well-to-do. I had a great great uncle (or something? He was my great grandfather’s uncle) Vilmush Krumbach owned a machine shop where my great grandfather Adam Krumbach learned the machinist’s trade and became a journeyman by age 16.

“Prior to WWI my great grandfather was conscripted into the Austrian Army, but around 1913 he left Yugoslavia when he learned that although his conscription was up, they were planning on keeping everyone in the army anyway.” He came to the United States on a boat with first class travel, had papers to get into the country and so was able to avoid Ellis Island.

Adam went to work for The Jacob Ruppert Brewery in Manhattan where he practiced his machinist trade (which my Aunt Elaine tells me was much like an engineering position by today’s standards). He married my great grandmother in 1915, she had also come from Cervinka, Yugoslavia. My grandfather was born in a nice area on the east side of Manhattan in 1919.

My great grandfather had a brother who died when he was young. He had a step-sister who never married but came to the United States as a ladies maid for a wealthy woman (this was a very good life for her). My aunt believes that most of the other Krumbachs remained in Cervinka until the WWII era when they were evicted from their homes and businesses and forced to walk back to Germany, leaving everything behind. Wow, that’s sad. What a mess of things WWII was.

But wait, back up a second to happy things, my great grandfather was an engineer in a brewery? That is the coolest thing I’ve ever heard! I just had to learn more about this brewery. I discovered The Good Old Days of Beer in New York at beernexus.com, which talks all about the brewery.

Records online are a bit confusing, but as far as I can tell the first Ruppert family brewery in the US was started by Franz Ruppert who was an immigrant from Bavaria, and his son Jacob Ruppert Sr. created his own brewery in his father’s footsteps and his son Jacob Ruppert Jr. eventually took over the brewery’s business. At one time the brewery was the third largest in the United States, coming behind Busch (which was churning out 1 million barrels a year) and NYC competitor Ehret, who was pushing 600,000 barrels a year. The brewery was known for high quality beer and the ambition Jacob Ruppert showed with it came to salesmanship and making connections with “every German organization he could find.”

In 1913 the brewery made their final expansion, the timing is right for my great grandfather to have started working there as soon as he came to the United States. My great grandfather got to know Jacob Ruppert Jr. quite well, and by then Ruppert had spent time in Congress, served as a Colonel in the National Guard and in 1914 he became the owner of the New York Yankees (as such, most of the info online is about his ownership of the Yankees rather than the brewery).

Alas, the 18th Amendment came along and introduced Prohibition. The Jacob Ruppert brewery went out of business. Stupid 18th Amendment. EDIT: Not true! See this post for info from the great great grandson of Jacob Ruppert, he set me straight.

I might not take pride in accomplishments of others (even family), but it’s neat to be able to say I have solid family roots in the golden age of NYC Brewing!

Last month I posted about how I had given up on my Belkin wireless card and wanted to replace it. answered my plea and within a week I had the linux happy Linksys WPC11. It Just Worked in Ubuntu when I plugged it in. So awesome. The range is better than that of the Belkin card too, and it runs solid. It’s so nice when things work, I’m posting so long after this success because 1) I forgot to earlier and 2) I thought it was worth mentioning even if it is so late. Thanks again Colin!

In other hardware news I got my new graphics card this week and am back to my 1600×1200 resolution and maximum productivity!

I posted to the PLUG list last night, for the first time in a while. Plans for the website and input needed from members. I’ll be spending some time this weekend working on it.

The PA LoCo team site is live! MeetLinux.com is the url, provided by a company in the area along with hosting space. The original plan for the site was to use Joomla but then I joined the web project and tossed that idea out the window. I don’t like giant CMSes and since all we really needed was a “news” function and member logins so others could submit content I decided to go with WordPress. I grabbed a template and had the site in it’s current state within just a couple days of tweaking. I’m quite happy with it. The next step with the team is getting the mailing list set up, that’s something the Ubuntu side handles though since we’ll be getting a ubuntu-us-pa list. It’s pretty exciting that I joined the team just as things started getting rolling. Today they had an installfest meeting down in Philly to work out details of an upcoming installfest – I didn’t attend the meeting but I left some dates I’m free with the team so they would think of me when planning the date, I would really like to attend the installfest.

And now that I am involved with this LoCo I officially have to draw a line here with my volunteer work. I am busy, bordering on too busy. I technically have time to handle everything on my plate right now, plus more, but I am not too keen on burying myself in volunteer work all day. I have a husband, a house to maintain, kitties to play with and the time I spend reading technical articles and catching up with friends is crazy important to being happy. Having volunteer work turn into a chore is not something I’d like to see happen again.

Speaking of having a life away from my computer, most of my day today fit that. The weather hovered on “gloomy” all day, even if it didn’t end up raining. I was able to get grocery shopping done, run a bunch of errands. This afternoon I ended up at the video store and rented Spinal Tap (which I’d never seen) and Life of Brian, which I really should own but somehow don’t – too bad they weren’t selling it. I did buy Young Frankenstein, which is one of our favorite comedies, I was going to just rent it but renting was $4 and buying it new was only $10.

I also made the plunge to feisty today on my desktop. It was one of the zillions of journal entries I’ve seen lately about beryl that did it. I couldn’t be bothered previously to muck about with config files and graphics card settings to get it running in edgy, so the official support in feisty was a desirable feature. The upgrade went flawlessly, booting into the new kernel didn’t break anything! And beryl? 2 commands:

sudo apt-get install beryl beryl-manager emerald-themes (installs stuff)
beryl-manage (starts beryl)

Voila! I was really impressed. It’s not flawless on my 5 year old machine (a little jitter when minimizing windows), but it’s quite usable. I won’t be using it full time, but it’s sure a cool thing to show off. When I showed it to Michael this afternoon it was as close to getting him to say “Maybe I should install Ubuntu” as I’ve ever gotten ;)

I’m upgrading to fiesty on my laptop as I’m writing this, somewhere in it’s lifetime (it started out as a breezy box) it appears to have gotten the impression that it’s running software raid, which is neat because it only has one harddrive. I need to track that down, the poor thing is quite confused and I have been getting a lot of mdadm errors during the upgrade… and I just saved this post to boot into my new feisty kernel. The upgrade wasn’t as flawless as my desktop one, I had to `dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg` to get a resolution better than 800×600. Now opera is segfaulting, which is annoying. Nice, firefox just did too. Oh boy… must go off to investigate.

Last night I didn’t feel like eating in so Michael suggested we go out for sushi. We hadn’t been out for sushi in ages. There was a sushi place down in Jenkintown that we used to go to, but the last few visits have not impressed us much – I guess the neighborhood is just getting sucked into the city and going bad. There is a sushi place in Skippack which is only about 4 miles from our house, but we weren’t overly impressed with them. So Michael hit Google and found Bonjung Japanese Restaurant in Collegeville. Sushi is always a risky experience, but I was up to it.

We were pleasantly surprised. The prices were a bit high at first glance, but when we saw the generous portions of fish we could see why. And FRESH! Boy that was some fresh fish, probably the best salmon I’ve ever had at a sushi bar. Best of all? Michael requested a special roll that was quite untraditional and after going back and forth with the waitress about specifics a few times she presented us with exactly what he wanted. She got a nice tip for her efforts. I think we found a new sushi place! And it’s only 15 minutes from our house. Wait… that’s dangerous…

So, who saw the DSA on Sunday and thought of me? Hmm? Anyone? Webcalendar is fixed up! The credit almost entirely goes to my co-maintainer, while I was mourning my graphics card all weekend he was busy following up on our mandate from the security team and patching sarge (oldstable). We also did another release this week, added php5 to the dependencies (along with php4) after far too much discussion on -mentors and the bug reports about how it would break if you had php4 installed but libapache-mod-php5 – dependencies are satisfied but it won’t work. I made the executive decision to move forward based on precedent (other packages support both 4 and 5) and wanting to keep php4 support.

Which reminds me I ordered a new GFX card.

Local Linux stuff – the PLUG website has sort of limped along since left a few years ago. kept all meeting information up to date (which is the important part!) and would routinely update the other local groups pages. Since I’m now running PLUG Montco he gave me access a couple months back and I have big dreams! Actually, not that big, I just want to freshen up parts of the site that have started to collect dust. I dropped an email to the other admins and “interested parties” on Sunday.

There is an active Pennsylvania Ubuntu LoCo! How cool is that? Forums here. I was musing in an email to a fellow I met at PLUG recently about how I should contact the one I thought existed and he laughed and said he was one of the administrators! Haha! They’re just getting started, launched a website and have some meetings an installfests planned. I offered to help out with some startup administrative stuff that they need help with because I’m a sucker for that sort of thing. Oh, and I love Ubuntu.

Last year I only read a half dozen books. That’s like a drought to me, when I think back on the year I want to say “I didn’t read anything last year!” and frown. Looking back I had a lot going on last year, between work (full time + contract), planning a wedding, and diving into projects like Ubuntu-Women it’s no surprise that I didn’t find much time for reading.

But I love reading and this year I’m working to make time for it. I’ve started reading most nights before I go to bed. I’ve found that an 30-60 minutes of of reading before I sleep works wonders on how well I sleep and how satisfied I feel in general. While I’m still behind what I was reading in years past, I’ve managed to get through about 6 books so far this year, already hitting last year’s number. Yay! As for what I’m reading – it’s a lot of scifi and fantasy, with some history mixed in for fun. I mentioned Saints by Orson Scott Card a little while back, I’m almost finished with it and it’s a fascinating “sort of historical” look at the early days of the Mormon church that has me engrossed.

I love books.