Monday we feature the fifth baseball-themed add, which will continue through the World Series. The ad is for Baltimore’s National Bohemian and specifically National Premium Beer. It’s hard to tell when the ad is from, because it shows a lot of old baseball memorabilia for the Baltimore Orioles. It’s at least after my childhood favorite player, Brooks Robinson, started playing — and that was 1955. Though it seems more likely it was after he became a legendary player, and I can’t say exactly when that happened. The tagline for the ad reads. “National Premium Beer. Our Name Says It. Our Taste Proves It.” After that, it’s all about the Orioles, which was my favorite baseball team growing up.
And I just pulled out the box of baseball cards that my mother didn’t manage to throw away and found my Brooks Robinson baseball card from the 1970 season, forty years ago.
Very classy ad and packaging.
Can’t quite make out the fine print, but it seems to say “G. Heileman Brewing Co., Baltimore, MD” so that’d date it from between 1979 (when Heileman bought the recently [1975] merged Carling-National) and when the brewery was closed by Stroh right after they bought Heileman in ’96.
I wonder if National Premium ( a different, more expensive beer than National Bohemian) was still being brewed at the end? It was tasty stuff – for the 1970’s.
Yes, I checked that line out — and it does say G. Heileman. Kind of shocking because I don’t remember that beer at all in the 70’s or later.
I think the beer eventually had a very limited distribution region close to Baltimore even under National and Carling-National (I only remember buying it in NJ once) and that probably continued under Heileman. Heileman eventually bottled it in the more squat “select” bottle shape (similar to, say, Anchor’s today and what Heileman used for Old Style and probably others of their many brands) so the longer, thinner bottle as shown in the ad might date in from the late 70’s to the early 80’s.
My fondest memories of the 70’s/early 80’s Orioles and National Boh were at Memorial Stadium in the general admission seats on the 3rd base line (just past the base) upper deck for $3.75 and you could bring in an Igloo water type cooler full of beer as long as you bought another ticket for the cooler. We would empty a case of Boh (about $5) into the cooler and float a ziploc bag of ice on top. It would stay cold and crisp enough for us well into the 7th inning. By that time we had enough anyway. Anybody remember Chuck Thompson, voice of the Birds, would say “ain’t the beer cold !” whenever the team did something exciting?