Beer v. Wine Patent Search
If I ever go to law school, then I’ll probably end up focusing on intellectual property. As a result, I find Google’s new patent search pretty exciting. Sure, you could’ve searched USPTO’s site before, but the quality of the search stinks compared to what Google just released.
Anyway, one of the first things I searched for was beer and wine patents. Here is the earliest filed beer-related patent (July 15, 1810; issued May 16, 1911). It deals with a bottle-filling apparatus, especially good for beer.
Here is the earliest filed wine-related patent (May 15, 1860;
issued June 29, 1880). It’s actually a fruit and lard press, but wine is mentioned on line 16. It looks like beer was more on the minds of early inventors! The first patent more directly related to wine is this one for a pomace-laying attachment for wine or cider presses, though this one for extracting coca using wine is pretty interesting.
