Johann Adam Blüm (Blim) was born in Worms, Prussia.  In 1839 he married Magdalena (Lena) Annie Keller.  It was a union that would produce three children. 

The Blüm family emigrated to America on the 23rd of July, 1860 and settled in Iowa.  Upon doing so they anglicized their name from Blüm to Blim.  In 1861 the railroads arrived in Waterloo and with them the Blims.  Adam with his oldest son, 23-year-old Martin, opened a meat market in that town in the summer of 1865.  Waterloo was growing fast in the early 1860s and the Blim and Son Meat Market was growing fast too.  Over then next few years the business was expanded into a grocery and general provisions stand.

Since 1865 Joseph Taylor, an Englishman, had been doing brisk business in Waterloo with an ale brewery.  Certainly to the Germanic Blims this fact was noted, as was the fact that nobody in town was actually making lager.

In 1869 the Blims saw an opportunity and put their resources into a beer brewery on the outskirts of town that had recently been put up by Messrs Fressle & Tschirgi.  The Fressle & Tschirgi firm had been sunk by outstanding debts and the Blims and fellow German emigre Caspar Baro purchased the brewery at a sheriff's auction on August 10th.  They passed one of their first kegs to the editor of the Waterloo COURIOR in December and he claimed it was "equal to the best made anywhere."

Together the Blims and Caspar Baro ran the brewery until 1876, after which Martin became sole proprietor.  Martin then leased the brewery to Julius Goldstein, who later purchased the property after a fire had leveled it in 1880.  Goldstein along with partner George Rainer, ran the firm again for a time, but again ran up debts they could not repay.  Rainer skipped town and the brewery was liquidated.  Growing anti-saloon sentiment in Waterloo assured that it never reopened.  Johann Adam Blim died on the 3rd of March, 1899 at age 81 years of age.

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