Bass Pale Ale Ad from the New York Times December 23, 1937

Happy New Year 2019 to one and all!!! While it is the year 2019, I am still stuck in the year 1937. As with my last two posts, I am looking at ads from the December 23, 1937 edition of the New York Times and found a couple of interesting beer ads that I wanted to profile in the next few posts.

For those of you who don't know, I have an ongoing beer tasting series on my IG-TV channel entitled The SiscoVanilla Beer Chronicles. Very simply put, I find a beer and taste it and give my impressions on it. Not anything fancy. Just honest straight talk for good or bad. On to the beer of the moment: Bass Pale Ale.

My friend Pete likes to describe Bass as being the most perfect beer. He often laments that you can't find Bass much anymore. I have to be perfectly honest, I find that coming across a bar that pours a draught of Bass is hard to locate. When I started bouncing in the mid 1990's, you could find Bass Ale on tap in many a bar in NYC. Now? It seems like only the old school Irish pubs carry it. I guess you can also find it in what some bars that old school New Yorkers refer to as "The Disneyworld of Irish Pubs" that can be found near Madison Square Garden and Rockefeller Center.  But walk into your regular corner pub and you might not see that tap with the distinctive red triangle with the word Bass in red underneath. We're not talking about a fly by night beer brand here folks.

William Bass started brewing his namesake ale in 1777 in the town of Burton-upon-Trent, England. One hundred years later, Bass Ale could be found not only throughout the British Empire but in other places around the world. To show how popular and well known the Bass brand name was, the distinctive red triangle of Bass Brewery was the first trademark to be registered with Trade Mark Registration Act 1875. Also take a look at Édouard Manet 1882 painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère:

The scene of the painting is located the Folies Bergère nightclub in Paris, France. As you can see, there are two bottles with the distinctive red triangle to both the left and right of the lovely bartender.  But by the beginning of the 21st century the Bass brand in flux. 

The brand was bought by the Belgian brewing company known Interbrew, now known AB-InBev. British anti-monopoly rulings forced the separation of the brand name from the product itself. Interbrew kept the Bass brand name while the brewery being sold to Coors UK. The license to brew Bass was then given to Wolverhampton & Dudley Breweries PLC, Bass was being brewed in England and in the U.S. among places but neither one was brewed in the same manner as the original Bass Ale. All this convoluted mess makes it hard for someone to get themselves a proper Black and Tan (Guinness and Bass.)

But hopefully the announcement from this past November that Bass would be reintroduced to the UK and brewed in England as an "Imported Ale"😕🤔😖 as a 5.1% ABV beer at the Samlesbury, Lancashire Brewery and sold in selected pubs. For more on this I recommend you read the article Bass Ale is back. I wish I were more delighted by British beer writer Pete Brown. He's not too keen on the "return" of Bass Ale to the UK. Read his post for more in depth information on what has happened to Bass and what is to come. 

On my end, I guess I'll have to wait a bit before getting myself a proper Black and Tan for my SiscoVanilla Beer Chronicles posts. 

I have a couple more beer posts in the queue in addition to some new Movie and TV booze posts. Keep an eye out open for those. See you in Brooklyn at Finns Corner (660 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, NY.) 

Until Then Keep Drinking,

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