The London Beer Flood

On October 17, 1814, one of the enormous wooden porter vats at Henry Meux & Co.’s Horse Shoe Brewery in St Giles, London, burst after one of its iron hoops failed. The collapse damaged neighboring vessels and released hundreds of thousands of liters of porter. The beer broke through the brewery wall and surged into the densely built streets and cellars behind the brewery. Eight people were killed, most of them women and children living in the surrounding neighborhood. At the coroner’s inquest, brewery employees testified that hoops occasionally slipped from vats without previously causing serious consequences, and the deaths were ultimately judged accidental. The disaster demonstrates both the human risks and the extraordinary industrial scale reached by London porter brewing, whose large breweries matured and stored beer in wooden vats capable of holding thousands of barrels.