WBAL - Bringing Back National Premium Beer
by Scott Wykoff
It's a dream come true for a Marylander.
The Easton resident is bringing back National Premium.
"My name is Tim Miller and I am in the process of bringing National Premium beer back to the market in Maryland, Baltimore and beyond," the Salisbury University grad and former Seagulls lacrosse player proudly told WBAL's Scott Wykoff in the main office of his brewing empire, the dining room of his home in Easton.
Easton's Tim Miller is bringing National Premium Beer back to life. The native Maryland and Eastern Shore realtor bought the trademark to National Premium Beer at auction in NYC two years ago and now he's getting ready to roll out the beer generations of Marylanders loved.
The Eastern Shore realtor has been working for years now to make it happen.
You know, National Premium Beer, the "premium beer of choice for generations of Marylanders".
In 1936 the National Brewing Company in Baltimore began brewing National Premium as the "upscale beer of Baltimore". The same National Brewing Company that followed National Premium with its brother beer, National Bohemian.
While Mr. Boh is the familiar face of Natty Boh, thanks to the efforts and passion of Tim Miller, Mr. Pilsner (at one time spelled Pilsener) is once again the face of National Premium Beer.
"I wanted to bring a beer back from the dead and had been searching for a brand when two Novembers ago I'm sitting there reading the New York Times and I see an advertisement for a trademark auction and I said O.K. I'm going to take a look at that," Miller told WBAL's Scott Wykoff sitting on the tailgate of his pick-up. "And there were three beverages for sale, one being National Premium. And I just looked around and said this can't be real. I booked my train and hotel room and signed up for the auction (at the Waldorf Astoria) and went up there and came home with it, thankfully."
And the rest will soon be Maryland brewing history.
He says, back in the day, National Premium was a craft beer before there were craft beers.
"If you talk to somebody in their fifties from Baltimore, they remember that's what they got when they went to the prom. That's what I got on Sunday's when I watched the Colts. it was a special treat to get National Premium. People feel strong, emotional ties to it."
Tim has been working hard for years now to bring the special treat to future generations of Marylanders and to folks who grew up with it like his brother Mike who helped him as a taste tester after he tracked down the recipe for the famous brew.
"Through connections, basically through lacrosse, I stumbled into an old brew master and got the old formula," explained Miller. "Which was a huge hurdle to clear."
Tim then entrusted that formula to Master Brewer Walter Trifari at Fordham and Old Dominion Brewing Company in Dover, just a short from his home in Easton.
Now Walter and his colleagues are playing a role in the next step of bringing National Premium back to life.
"Tim really had some great notes," adds Trifari. "He had all the details of how they made that beer. All the ingredients, the mash regime, just the brewing cycle. So I simply looked that over very deeply, saw how it would fit into our brew house and how we go through production and we were able to make it work."
Now he and the team at the brewery in Dover are excited to see how it will turn out.
"It's an American lager," explains Walter for folks who have never had a chance to tip back at National Premium. "Very drinkable, a very good session beer. Just a really clean, delicious lager."
"It's contagious," says Trifari when asked what it was like to work with someone who has a passion for what he is doing like Tim Miller. "You can see it on his face and his eyes. He is super excited about the brand. It's helping us be excited. It's not just somebody coming in and saying make this because I want to make a ton of money. No, he wants to resurrect something that has some meaning and knows that people are going to appreciate it. So it makes us very happy to work with him."
Tim says it has been great working with Jim Lutz and the team at Fordham and Old Dominion as they help him bring back National Premium.
"Jim Lutz who is an industry veteran and used to own Wild Goose Beer and believe it or not 8 years ago I pitched this idea to him and now we have come full circle," says Miller. "He is now the CEO of Fordham Brewing and they are going to contract brew the beer for us,"
He says it is a great small brewery that has the capacity that he needs to get National Premium to market.
"We had hoped to do it right in the city of Baltimore but there just aren't any breweries there with the size, capacity and equipment we need to brew this special beer," says Miller.
Miller hopes to one day brew this Maryland-owned beer at a future brewery on his family's property in Easton.
Right now Tim Miller can't wait until National Premium soon once again arrives in a bar, restaurant or store near you.
"Let me know what you think about it," is his message to Maryland beer drinkers who will soon get to enjoy National Premium once again. "Hopefully it is true to the recipe and the heritage and that's what we've really tried to do, as much as we can, to stay true to our Maryland roots."
"National Premium along with National Bohemian thrived in the 1950s and 1960s, outperforming the other local beers, Gunther, Free State, Arrow. But competition from out- of- town breweries began to erode sales. National merged with Carling in 1973 and production of National Premium was moved in 1978 from the old brewery at Conkling and Dillon streets to a newer plant in Halethorpe off the Baltimore beltway . In 1979 G. Heileman bought that brewery, folding National Premium into its line of beers. In 1996 Stroh Brewing Company took over Heileman and stopped making National Premium which by then was produced only in cans.
In 1999 an attempt to revive National Premium drew a crow including former Maryland governor and Baltimore Mayor William Donald Schaefer to a kickoff announcement on the Baltimore waterfront . Mr. Schaefer, who at the time was state comptroller, took a celebratory sip of the brew, a beer he said he used to enjoy before he stopped drinking in 1968. However, production of National Premium failed to come to fruition when the brewer, Frederick Brewing Company, went into bankruptcy."
