Essay28 July 2026 · By Sophie Ro

The Green Triangle and the Oldest Trademark in British Beer

The first trademark was a beer trademark

The Trade Marks Registration Act of 1875 was the first British statute to create a formal register of commercial marks. It opened for applications on 1 January 1876. Before that, protecting your mark meant paying lawyers to fight for it in court, case by case. After it, protection was a matter of paperwork — as long as you got in first.

Bass understood the stakes immediately. Its pale ale was already a global product, shipped to Trieste, Calcutta, New York and the Baltic, and imitated everywhere it went. So a Bass employee slept on the pavement outside the new Trade Mark Registry Office at 47 Chancery Lane the night of 31 December, waiting for Henry Reader Lack — the first Registrar of Trade Marks — to open the door. When he did, the Bass red equilateral triangle became UK Trade Mark No. 1. A second Bass mark — the diamond, for the stronger export ale — became No. 2, registered the same day.

Every registered trademark in this country traces its lineage back to that queue. And the mark at the front of it, the one every subsequent trademark is by definition later than, was about beer. That is not a nice coincidence. It is the founding fact of British trademark law. When you build a beer app and you need to pick a shape, you don't get to pretend that history isn't there.

What else could we pick?

We considered the alternatives. A star is too generic — every rating system on earth uses stars. A dot is what everything else on the radar already is; the whole point is to stand out from the dots. A crown is imperial. A pin is Google Maps. A heart is favourites, and we already use hearts for favourites. A shield is too try-hard. A pint glass icon inside a pin is fine but reads as "this app is about beer," which the user is already looking at an app about beer to know.

A triangle carries meaning without needing explanation. It is directional — a downward triangle literally points at something — and it is the one geometric mark that the drinker's own subconscious already links to beer, whether they consciously know why or not. If you have ever picked up a bottle of Bass, or stood in front of a Manet at the Courtauld, or seen a Newcastle Brown label, or watched Boddingtons pour, you've been trained. You just haven't been told.

So: a downward-pointing triangle, sitting on top of the pub we think you should walk to next. Directional. Recognisable. And with a lineage that quietly belongs to beer already — we just borrowed it.

Manet knew you'd know

Six years after that queue outside the registry, Édouard Manet finished A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. It hangs today in the Courtauld Gallery on the Strand. Behind the barmaid a mirror shows the crowded music-hall. In front of her, on the marble bar, sit two Bass Pale Ale bottles, red triangles facing the viewer.

Nobody had to explain the label. That was the whole point. A French painter, working in Paris, put a British beer bottle on the counter of a Paris cabaret because he knew — and knew that his audience knew — what it was. The triangle had become a language. Very few beer brands have ever earned that. The Bass triangle got there first, by decades, and it did it with a shape a five-year-old could draw from memory.

That is the shape we borrowed. Not the trademark. The lesson.

Why not paint it red

Because red is already saying something else on our radar.

Red blips on the PINtPOINT radar mark the pubs you've ❤️ favourited — the ones you already love, already know, already return to. A red Pick of the Pubs triangle would sit inside a scatter of red circles and read as another one of your favourites rather than tonight's pick from everything nearby. The whole job of the Pick is to surface a pub you might not have chosen for yourself — turning it red would fold it into the wallpaper of pubs you already choose.

The homage lives in the geometry, not the pigment. Bass proved a triangle is enough. Copying the colour would be a stunt; copying the discipline is the compliment. Our green stays green because green does the semantic work on PINtPOINT's specific canvas — green means go here, and it's not one you'd have picked yourself — the same principle Bass applied, dressed for a different room.

150 years on

Bass understood in 1876 what every good product mark has understood since: a shape carries a promise faster than a sentence. That is why a Bass employee slept on a pavement in December 1875 to be first through the door on New Year's Day. That is why the Bass triangle turned up, unlabelled, on the counter of Manet's cabaret six years later. And that is why, a century and a half on — to the year — the fastest way to say this one on a small screen at the end of a long day is still a triangle.

Different pigment. Same discipline. Happy sesquicentennial to the format that started it.

Find your Pick of the Pubs on PINtPOINT