Tales From Small Town Saskatchewan: Boh
My friend T reminded me the other day that I have never blogged about Boh. This is a terrible oversight, if I fancy that I am giving the world any sort of taste of smalltown Saskatchewan.
Boh. Short for 'Bohemian'. Only the finest beer that Saskatchewan has to offer. A pale lager. Zippy. Unpretentious. With three gold medals for excellence right on the front label. I just found it reviewed on a beer website, and it still seems to stand up, although the gold medals are from the sixties, I think.
In Leader and other neighbouring small towns, Boh had a very bad reputation when I was young. It was the beer that the old drunks swill all day in the local bar. When I came to Saskatoon for university, however, my friend and I ordered Boh as a joke one day - and it turned out to be fantastic! Who knew that the old drunks were on to something. You can't buy Boh in every pub in Saskatchewan; but if you find it in a pub, you know immediately that the owners must be connoisseurs of beer, who know that there are pockets of devoted Boh-fans out there.
So there you go. Boh. The misunderstood Saskatchewan beer.
5 Comments:
Sadly, every time I hear Boh mentioned I think of a very racist beer song that someone sang me once. It's profoundly disturbing. Of course the song may not have originated in Saskatchewan. One would hope.
I never drank Boh to any serious extent, except when with the Squirrel. I preferred to stretch my pennies by drinking O'Keefe's Extra Old Stock, which has an extra percent of alcohol, although not quite as zippy. Zippy?!
Now I really want to try it! I've never heard of it before, but I tend to like non-mainstream beers with a stronger flavor. (My standard is Guinness stout, of course.)
I wonder if they have it in one of the bars around here?
Hmmm - this is funny - when I arrived in Saskatoon some 20 odd years ago, my younger sister hung around with a crowd who only drank Boh, so I was surprised to hear it's a "small-town Sask. beer" - maybe the crowd (independent biker types)originated from small-town SK! BTW, I developed a bit of taste for it for awhile there ...
With all the stupid racist shit that's going on around my city right now, I wouldn't be surprised if that charming Boh song was composed in Saskatchewan. Some things need to change around here, and fast.
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Two other great things I forgot to mention about Boh:
1. it's union made
2. it has no preservatives
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Anonymous poster - what did you do when you lived in Saskatoon, and where do you live now? Always nice to hear from someone who used to live here.
... to continue with my "anonymousness", it's been a case of "Runnin’ Back To Saskatoon" a couple of times now - in my earlier stages in the 'toon, I welded and trained as a library tech, raised kids and "grew up" in the process, and presently am a student out of Vancouver.
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