Trademark: Bass Triangle Logo

First Used: 1855

Registered: 1889

Current Owner: AB INBEV UK LIMITED (Anheuser-Busch) [1]

Trademark Type: traditional trademark; design mark

Primarily Associated With: beer of all descriptions [2]

Brief (and likely incomplete) History [3]:

Bass Brewery was founded in 1777 by William Bass in Burton upon Trent, England. Before becoming a brewer, Bass had worked in the transportation business, carrying ale from Burton to other parts of England. Burton was already developing a reputation for brewing, aided by the mineral content of the area's water, and Bass quickly grew into one of the town's most successful beer producers. The brewery began exporting beer remarkably early, with Bass ale reportedly reaching Russia by 1784 and North America by 1799. The business continued expanding throughout the 1800s, eventually becoming one of the largest breweries in the world and selling Bass beer around the globe.

As the Bass brewery expanded, it began using a simple triangle to identify its pale ale. The triangle appeared on beer casks before the middle of the 19th century, and by 1855 Bass was using a solid red triangle on labels applied to bottles of Bass pale ale. The design was intentionally simple and highly visible, helping consumers identify Bass beer even as it was bottled and sold around the world.

The Bass Triangle Logo holds a unique place in trademark history. When the United Kingdom's Trade Marks Registration Act of 1875 created a formal trademark registration system, Bass moved quickly to protect its branding. On January 1, 1876, the first day registrations were accepted, a Bass pale ale label featuring the red triangle became UK Trade Mark No. 1. According to a frequently repeated story, a Bass employee even waited outside the registration office overnight on New Year's Eve to make sure the company's application would be first in line. Whether every detail of the story is true or not, Bass ultimately secured the first three registrations issued under the new system, and the original No. 1 registration remains active 150 years later.

Bass later protected the Bass Triangle Logo in the United States. On July 23, 1889, Bass obtained U.S. Trademark Registration No. 16,851 for a triangular design in connection with “beer of all descriptions.” The registration remains active today, making the Bass Triangle Logo also one of the oldest trademarks still registered in the United States. Bass has gone on to protect variations of the triangular design in the US, including the Bass Label design mark [4], and the Bass Black Triangle Logo design mark [5] (and of course, BASS® [6] is also a registered word mark).

The simple red triangle eventually became recognizable far beyond beer advertisements and pub signs. Bottles displaying the Bass Triangle Logo appear prominently in Édouard Manet's 1882 painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, and the Bass branding later appeared in numerous works by Pablo Picasso and other artists. James Joyce even referenced the distinctive appearance of Bass beer bottles in his 1922 novel Ulysses.