The Day London Was Flooded With Beer

On 17 October 1814, London experienced one of the strangest industrial disasters in brewing history.

At the Horse Shoe Brewery, a massive wooden vat holding porter failed. The rupture triggered additional failures and released an enormous quantity of beer into the surrounding St Giles neighbourhood.

Buildings were damaged. Walls collapsed. People were trapped. Eight people died.

History remembers the event as the London Beer Flood. The name almost makes it sound humorous. The reality was anything but.

Nineteenth-century breweries were major industrial facilities containing enormous vessels and huge inventories of liquid. When that infrastructure failed, beer itself could become dangerous simply because of its scale.

It is an important reminder that beer history is also industrial history. And sometimes industrial history turns deadly.

That's Tally's Take.

What the archive holds

The Horse Shoe Brewery has a record here, founded 1764 and long closed. So does Meux's Nine Elms brewery.

Keeping closed breweries is the whole point. A brewery that stopped is still part of how a city came to drink what it drinks — and in this case, part of how eight people died.