Great Beer Disasters Past And Present

Beer, or rather the lack of it via licensed premises, aka The Public House ....

A Beer Sentiment Shared By Many On Social Media ......

was mine, and many of my acquaintances, biggest bugbear about the coronavirus lockdown, and for us was something of a personal disaster ... So even the pubs reopening in a socially distanced manner is only a partial fix.

Lets face it, its where many of these people became my friends in the first place, and where we maintained our casual acquaintanceships. So the permanent loss of any of these establishments because of the restrictions making them uneconomic, could cost any government votes at the next election (certainly mine), regardless of the health concerns that caused their closure.

Yes, yes, I know that Covid-19 is perceived as worse than the bubonic plague in some peoples eyes (even though the survival rate is well over 95 per cent for those under age 70, while the plague killed two thirds of the entire population regardless of age), but that's because we live in the age of social media snowflakes and trolls. Many of those same trolls will apparently happily go out and riot protest (some times called a peaceful protest) with their fellows, and ignore those health concerns when it suits them.

Anyway, this mini-rant, kind of circuitously brings me round to the subject of this post .... another beer disaster of over 200 years ago.

Gentleman's Magazine Report Of October 1814
(Picture Of Brewery Added by me)

The 'London Beer Flood' of 1814. I had never heard of this until oddly it was mentioned on an episode of the US TV show 'American Pickers' ... and as you might guess it occurred in London in October 1814 (so before the Battle of Waterloo!), where it was reported in the Newspapers and the Gentleman's Magazine.

One of the wooden fermenting vats at  Meux & Co's Horse Shoe Brewery, which were 22 foot (6.7m) in height, and which were fermenting Porter (a very dark, hoppy beer) at the time, burst. This caused other vats to also start releasing their contents as their stop cocks were knocked off, and somewhere between 128,000 and 323,000 imperial gallons (580,000–1,470,000 litres or 154,000–388,000 US gallons), of beer were released in a deluge of biblical proportions.

The beer tsunami crashed into the back wall of the brewery which was 25 feet (7.6 m) high and two and a half bricks thick, sweeping it asunder, and then into some slum-dwellings on New Street, a small cul-de-sac that joined on to Dyott Street, in an area known as the St Giles rookery and which backed onto the brewery.

The tidal wave, which was cresting at nearly 15 feet high, demolished two houses and badly damaged two others, and caused a number of fatalities. Eight people were killed, with five of them being Irish mourners at the wake of a two-year-old boy. The Coroner later described the deaths as being caused "casually, accidentally and by misfortune".  

The disaster could have been prevented, because the metal bands that held the casks together, had been spotted as having slipped before the disaster by a clerk. He informed his supervisor, who had dismissed this information, as it had happened earlier before with no problems arising, before they were hammered back into place. Not this time though.

In the aftermath, brewery watchmen charged people to view the remains of the destroyed beer vats, and made a handy sum of money, as several hundred spectators turned up. The brewery itself was nearly bankrupted by the loss of beer worth £1,621,000 (in 2020 value), and it only avoided this after receiving a tax rebate worth £511,000 (in 2020 value), from Her Majesties Excise (Customs) on the lost beer. The five Irish victims, killed in the cellar were later given their own wake at The Ship public house in Bainbridge Street.

Sadly, there was no compensation to the victims and their families. Three of the victims bodies were laid out on the ground in a nearby factory yard by their families, for the public to see them and donate money for their funerals. Local collections were taken up more widely for the all the families.

An anti-Irish myth later grew up, that Irish spectators drank the spoilt beer from wherever it had collected, with a resultant mass drunkenness and a later death from alcohol poisoning a few days later .... this was totally untrue, and was not actually reported at the time.

So although I and many others think the recent pub closures were a 'beer disaster' .... they are nothing like as serious as the beer disaster that struck in 1814.