The London Beer Flood was an accident at Meux & Co’s Horse Shoe Brewery, London, on 17 October 1814.
At around 4:30 in the afternoon of 17 October 1814, George Crick, Meux’s storehouse clerk, saw that one of the 700-pound iron bands around a vat had slipped. The 22-foot tall vessel was filled to within four inches of the top with 3,555 barrels of ten-month-old porter, weighing approximately 32 tons. As bands slipped off the vats two or three times a year, Crick was unconcerned. He told his supervisor about the problem but was told “that no harm whatever would ensue”. Crick was told to write a note to Mr. Young, one of the brewery’s partners, to have it fixed later.
An hour after the hoop fell off, Crick was standing on a platform thirty feet from the vat, holding the note to Mr. Young, when the vessel, with no further indication, burst. The force of the liquid’s release knocked the stopcock from a neighboring vat, which also began discharging its contents; several hogsheads of porter were destroyed, and their contents added to the flood. Between 154,000 and 388,000 gallons were released.
The resulting wave of porter destroyed the back wall of the brewery and swept into an area of slum dwellings known as the St Giles rookery. Eight people died, five of them mourners at the wake being held by an Irish family for a two-year-old boy. The coroner’s inquest returned a verdict that the eight had lost their lives “casually, accidentally and by misfortune”. The event nearly bankrupted the brewery; it avoided collapse after a rebate from HM Excise on the lost beer. The brewing industry gradually stopped using large wooden vats after the accident. The brewery moved in 1921, and the Dominion Theater is now where the brewery used to stand. Meux & Co went into liquidation in 1961.
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