When Tim Miller saw that the rights to the defunct National Premium Beer brand and website were up for sale earlier this year, he couldn’t resist buying them at auction. “I always wanted to bring back a vintage brand, and here this was right in my own backyard,” say Miller, an Easton businessman who also sells commercial and residential real estate.
National Premium was a Baltimore beer with a reputation for being worth 15 cents a bottle compared to a dime for its brother beer, National Bohemian. While Natty Boh is still being brewed, although not in Maryland, National Premium dried up in 1996.
Miller says he has been test brewing the original recipe for National Premium and is still looking for a Maryland brewer to take on his line. “I plan to have it ready to market by the spring,” Miller says. He was featured on the History Channels hit cable show “American Pickers” on Dec. 19 where he sold artifacts from his family’s old McMahan Oil Company warehouse on Port Street. He says the money raised will go to promote the new brew. If sales take off, his goal is to reach a 100,000 cases a year.
Here is an excerpt from promotional material on Miller’s website. Caution: you must be 21 years old to enter the site.
“NATIONAL PREMIUM does not provide an unlimited market with unlimited quantity. On the contrary, it is a beer of definite originality – a beer of narrow boundaries – appealing to men and women who know the vales of a pale dry beer – rich in hard, clean malted grains – doubly fermented by a slow, old fashioned process – and then seasoned with care with an infusion of an unusual blending of hops.
It is a beer for the woman who knows the superiority of a camellia over a gardenia – for the man who responds to the fine points of a good dog, of a trim little boot – of a horse full of nerves.”
Good luck, Tim.
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