The London Beer Flood

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Location: The Horse Shoe Brewery, London, England, United Kingdom
Dates Active: October 17, 1814
Category: Mass Deaths, Unnatural Disasters
Cause: Porter Beer
Status: Closed
Entry ID: 012924A-00054

Summery: 

7,664 barrels of porter flooded a rookery in London, killing 8 people.

In Depth:

The Horse Shoe Brewery was built in 1764 at the end of Tottenham Street at the junction of Oxford Street, in London, England, the site which is currently occupied by the Dominion Theater. It wasn't the best neighborhood at the time, being smack dab in the middle of a "rookery": tightly packed slums and houses around nearby St. Giles's Church, which housed many poor families, the majority of whom were Irish immigrants. Despite it's surroundings the brewery was very well off. Though it changed ownership several times over the course of several decades, it still managed to produce over 100,000 barrels of porter in the year 1811.

However, on October 17, 1814 at around 4:30pm in afternoon the bottom metal ring holding together one of the giant, 22-foot tall wooden vats storing the fermenting porter came undone and slipped off the bottom. The ring weighed several hundred pounds and as such was no small task to put it back on. One of the workers on duty recorded the slip and sent a memo to get it fixed, though because it had happened before (reportedly two to three times a year with no ill effects on the vat itself) he wasn't to frantic about it. The vat in question was full at the time, containing 10 month old porter that was just about deemed mature enough for sale. In total, the vat contained around 3,555 barrels.

An hour after the hoop fell off, one of the workers was walking back towards the vat with the work order to repair the hoop in his hand when disaster struck: the vat burst open, spewing porter everywhere and destroying the back wall of the brewery. The resulting spray of beer took out several other hogsheads (shelves) of porter in a storehouse and broke another vat containing another 2,100 barrels of beer in the cellar below, over half of which ended up spilling out of the brewery as well. In total, somewhere around 7,664 barrels worth of beer were lost, all of it cutting a swath of destruction wherever it went.

The liquid punched a whole in the wall and collapsed the roof of the brewery, then spilled into the rookery surrounding it. A 15-foot wave smashed its way down the streets in a flash flood, destroying two homes and flooding dozens more. It even crashed through a wake, killing five of it's attendees. In total, 8 people died from the flood directly, though there is a rumor that at least one person died from alcohol poisoning in the days after the flood.

If you're wondering what happened afterward, well, charities were started to help those affected by the flood. The company that owned the brewery managed to convince the government to return the duty they already paid on the beer that they lost, saving the company from going bankrupt.

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Last Updated: March 16, 2024

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