ISO: Natural Bohemian FT: STL

As in “Natty Boh”?! I used to drink this in college in Virginia and scrounge around to find enough empties to return it in wooden cases to get a credit to get more…it was like bottom of the barrel beer when you can only piece together a few dollars and wanted to get the most beer for your buck…we still joke about it! To be fair, I wouldn’t mind trying a bottle again…I didn’t even realize it was still in production!

 

Haha oh man natty boh…what would make you want this lol…I last had it at Camden yards when I went to see an orioles/phillies game there last summer.

I don’t think we get this in distro around me but I’ll double check

 

The beer you're looking for is National Bohemian, named after the original brewer - the National Brewing Co. of Baltimore and other cities.

Still brewed (well, a beer marketed with than brand name is), now owned by Pabst, after a merger with Carling US, then a purchase by Heileman > Stroh > finally Pabst. Stroh closed the last Baltimore brewery (originally built as a Carling facility) in the late '90s, IIRC.

Below a recent label dated 2025, the "St. Louis" address means it's contract-brewed by Anheuser-Busch, likely in one of their east coast facilities (Williamsburg, Virginia being the closest to it's original market).

 

You’ll have to try this one sometime with Blue Crabs

https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/69472/120335/

 

Wooden cases? Most US brewers had abandoned them by the 1950s (well, don't know when you went to college, so...) and as with most new tech, it tended to be the smaller (and poorer) brewers who held onto old methods and packaging longest.


National was a Top 25 US brewer, with several breweries and a barrelage of over 2.5 million by the end of the 1960s. Like most large brewers, they packaged their returnable/refillable bottles in the reusable heavy plastic-coated fiberboard cases (aka "shells"). F'r'instance

 

Yeah, that was kinda that joke and charm of it, not to mention the place where we bought them - it was the 1980s and there was a general understanding that if you were going to buy a case of Natty Bos, they knew damn well you were going to bring them back for the deposit to get more…truth be told, even back then I though Natty Bo was swamp water and couldn’t handle more than a couple / few at a time, even when desperate…!