The Horrifying Happy Hour of the Great London Beer Flood

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/u-fl6G5vHak

How would you like to drown in a fifteen-foot tsunami of beer? Sound tasty? Well Londoners had the chance to find out in 1814 and I can’t help feeling kinda jealous. You may think it’s absolutely insane of me to say this, but at this particular time and place, there was such a thing as too much beer. If Oliver Twist was there and could have asked for more, he definitely wouldn’t have.

This is one of the crazier historical disasters ever to grace the mean streets of Napoleonic era Britain. Actually, it’s one of the craziest historical disasters to show up anywhere in any era of human history, and it involves a good amount of corporate malfeasance and shirking of accountability because of course only poor people died so who cares?

The Great London Beer Flood -- delicious or deadly? Let’s find out.

As the Age of Sail began to draw to a close and Napoleon was beginning to eat it hard on the high seas, Britain’s big 74s with their 36-pounder cannons were bashing the shit out of the French and its client fleets and sinking them into the drink. Against the backdrop of all this chaos and brutality of the Napoleonic Wars, a massive ongoing international conflict involving close to fifty countries and territories, London was thirsty.

The cool thing about London’s beer scene at the time is that the most popular drink in the city was porter. Porters originated in London in the 18th century, and it’s possible that they were named after the vocation they were most popular with when they first appeared on the scene. If you’re an IPA-drinking frat bro who’s never had one before, and you just can’t get that Jaeger bomb out of your mouth long enough to sip on some to try it out, a porter is among the most delicious beers in existence. Yeah, that’s my personal opinion, but in this case it also has some major historical backing behind it.

Porter is a dark and creamy beer similar to a stout, usually brewed with ale yeast and chock full of malty chocolate and hearty caramel notes. Spawning from the Industrial Revolution, porters were one of the first beers that were brewed specifically to taste good. Most beer up until then was simply manufactured based on cost efficiency and availability of ingredients. And nobody aged beer before it was sold back then like we do now, so the complexity of flavors and alcohol content wasn’t up to the standards it can be today. For example, a regular pint of beer in the Napoleonic era would have been about one to maybe three percent alcohol by volume, whereas today the standard is five percent, but that can go all the way up to a whopping 75%. Turns out there are lots of breweries really pushing the threshold of safety and sanity when it comes to extreme brews, like this one that for some reason is wrapped in a dead squirrel (Brewdog - End of History). Of course that’s not normal, and most beer doesn’t get above the low double digits.

But porter was the first ever beer that was made to meet real customer demands. Actual real people liked it, as opposed to the disgusting pee water and IPAs they had at the time. Yeah, I said that, IPAs are disgusting. They were made that way because they had to be, because refrigeration didn’t exist. Deal with it. Either way, just imagine living in a time when you could finally get plastered on something you genuinely wanted to drink. The porter marked the beginning of this utopian era and the age of good beer.

What I have here is the porter from Founder’s Brewing Company. It has a creamy texture and tastes baking chocolatey with a deep-bodied chewiness, with notes of roasted sugar, coffee, a balanced hop flavor that doesn’t overtake the overall balance. It’s an exceptionally drinkable brew for those of you who can put your IPAs down for five seconds and try something good.

One of the most popular and largest producers of porter in London was the Horseshoe Brewery, which was located at the corner of Great Russell Street and Tottenham Court Road. Today it’s the site of the art deco Dominion Theatre. Back in 1764 when it opened, the brewery was named after the Horseshoe Public House--public house being where the term “pub” would originate. Public house meant that bars back then were really just houses that you lived in in public, with all your wasted friends. If you ever needed a cool new way to look at it, and you want to bring something back out of history now that everything’s terrible, I think we could start with that.

The Horseshoe Pub was established all the way back in 1623 and named for the shape of its dining room. The brewery was the 11th largest producer of porter in the city, putting out 40,279 barrels every year. The porter at the Horseshoe matured for months at a time, and even up to a year for the very best varieties.

In 1809, Henry Meux, a partner at one of London’s largest breweries, Meux Reid of the Griffin Brewery in Clerkenwell, bought the Horseshoe Brewery and incorporated it into the Henry Meux & Co brand identity. Henry’s father Richard was a brewer, and the success of Meux & Co would launch a family dynasty of beer magnates and socialites that would extend into nobility and members of parliament. They were so stupid rich by the third generation that they built one of the first roller skating rinks, called Rinkomania, and they even saved London’s Temple Bar Gate when the city wanted to widen the street but obviously didn’t want to destroy a monument with a 500-history. So the Meux family bought it, paid to disassemble and reassemble it at their own estate, Theobalds House, where it stood all the way up until 2004. You can go to Theobalds Park and see a little plaque there now.

Alright, rewind back to 1814. Under Henry Meux’s tenure, the Horseshoe Brewery grew in size and stature and became the sixth largest producer of porter in London, putting out 103,502 barrels a year. So what I’m telling you is, there was a massive amount of creamy liquid gold housed inside this brewery, poised to find its way into the waiting mouths of the British people, whether they liked it or not. And on one particular night, all that porter did escape, and it would go on to acquire a bloodlust that would devour the streets of London and cement itself into the collection of the wildest historical footnotes of all time.

On October 17th, 1814, almost exactly eight months prior to the Battle of Waterloo where Napoleon would get smacked around like a TK, disaster would strike. It all began when brewery storehouse clerk George Crick casually observed that one of the porter barrels was in need of a little maintenance. But these weren’t just any barrels. Henry Meux had specially designed massive 22-foot wooden vats to mature his porter. These things were the size of houses. They were legitimate tourist attractions. Each of them held 18,000 Imperial pounds of porter, which is not in freedom units so it’s hard to tell, but it sounds like a whole lot.

These gigantic barrels were held together with the help of enormous iron hoops that weighed 700 pounds each. That’s 2.7 Dwayne the Rock Johnsons. Each band. And the slats of these vats were secured by multiple bands each. Every now and then, one of these big iron hoops would slip out of position. This happened at least a few times a year, so Crick didn’t panic or think much of it at all. It wasn’t the end of the world, or at least it hadn’t been thus far. He simply followed protocol and began drafting a note to have the barrel repaired.

Crick’s supervisor instructed him to write his note to Mr. Young, who was a partner at the brewery, so that Mr. Young could kickstart the repair on the iron band that had lost its way. At around 4:40 pm, Crick was holding the very note in his hand while standing on a platform some thirty feet away from the damaged vat when the whole thing suddenly broke apart.

At this point, Crick was like, “Oh f*ck. This was not, like, in the job description.” And he knew he wasn’t nearly thirsty enough to drink thousands of pounds of beer by himself in order to save the citizens of London. He’d be over the limit anyway, and he definitely wouldn’t be able to drive his carriage home. Or maybe his zeppelin. I’m not sure how he got to work.

But one exploding house-sized vat of beer doesn’t just keep to itself, and the dangerous physics of the whole thing would reveal itself to Crick in sinister slow motion as he stood helplessly by and watched the slats of another barrel begin to give way. The pressure of the absolute volcanic explosion of beer pouring out of these vats initiated a chain reaction, and combined with a bit of corrosion on these gigantic iron bands, more and more barrels burst apart at the seams, and there was nothing Crick could do except basically wait to die.

Alright, this is where our tale of historical disaster gets really shitty. Behind the brewery was an area called the St Giles Rookery. A rookery was a word in the common vernacular of the day that was used to describe a slum. It was where the absolute dregs of society lived. It housed all the poors that nobody else wanted to look at, and that London could push into dingy basements stacked deep with multiple families each. An English preacher of the time called it “a rendezvous of the scum of society,” which is always a nice religiously minded thing to say about people.

The word rookery came from a description of the nests of birds from the crow family called rooks, which are found throughout Europe. I looked around a bit and didn’t see any of these here in ‘Murica. I mean I looked out the window and I don’t see any birds sitting on powerlines sipping tea, so I think we’re safe from that noise. Rookeries were said to be like the nests of these birds, just loud and chaotic and best to be avoided at all costs. They were famously filled to the brim with crime, brothels, hard drinking, and general merriment of a sort that was taken just a bit too far and engaged in a bit too enthusiastically because life basically kind of sucked there.

The English painter William Hogarth depicted St Giles in some of his work, and the area was likely the inspiration for his 1751 print Gin Lane. The slum was home to city denizens on the lowest economic rungs of the ladder. These were people who were desperate to go to war to fight Napoleon because there was simply no way out of the destitute lifestyle they’d face otherwise. British Redcoats are often portrayed a certain way in popular media and movies, but in reality they were people from St Giles and elsewhere like it--poor, uneducated, often criminals, and willing to be paid absolute garbage in order to have the remotest shot in life, even risking death while doing it. Redcoats were paid less than unskilled laborers of the time. It was awful work, but apparently even more awful to live in the St Giles Rookery.

Because on top of everything else, the Irish lived in the St Giles, too, which was just taking things way too far for a lot of the civilized English of the day. “You take your potatoes and your Lucky Charms and you stay in the basement,” they told the Irish. “You magically delicious motherf*ckers.”

The St Giles Rookery sat along the rear of the Horseshoe Brewery in a cul-de-sac. A massive wall two bricks thick was the only thing separating rows and rows of two-story beer vats from the streets and subterranean dwellings of the residents of the slum. And you’d think that would be enough. But against a wave made of an estimated one million liters of beer, the wall stood absolutely no chance.

And neither did the residents of the St Giles Rookery. The housing here was run down, decrepit, and rooms were generally death traps, especially since a lot of them were basement dwellings below ground level.

Two and a half million pints of beer ran out into a 15-foot tsunami into the rookery. The wave annihilated the first two houses it touched, just completely turned them into rubble. Another two were critically damaged but still somehow standing by the end. The first victim of the London Beer Flood was four-year-old Hannah Bamfield. She was having tea with her mother and another child in the very first house that was destroyed. Somehow the rush of beer swept the other two out of the house altogether, but Hannah was tragically trapped in the rubble when the structure came down.

Beyond tragically, in the second house that came down, a downtrodden Irish family was gathered while having a wake for a two-year-old boy. The boy’s mother, Anne Saville, was killed when the beer collapsed the walls, along with four others, including a three-year-old boy. The others killed were Mary Mulvey, the mother of the three-year-old, Elizabeth Smith, and Catherine Butler were lost in the debris.

Fourteen-year-old Eleanor Cooper worked for the Tavistock Arms in Great Russell Street, and she was washing pots in the pub’s yard at the time of the accident. Eleanor likely didn’t have any time to react when the Horsheshoe Brewery’s massive brick wall collapsed, falling on her and crushing her beneath the rubble. was also killed by the collapsing brewery wall as she was washing pots in the Tavistock Arms pub yard.

The topography of St Giles was flat and there were a lot of basements. So there was nowhere for this massive lake of beer to go except into people’s homes. There are multiple reports of terrified people climbing onto furniture to escape certain death by drowning in the 7,600 barrels worth of porter that had suddenly and violently cascaded into the slum.

As for brewery clerk George Crick, he ended up walking away from the whole thing just fine. In fact, no one from the brewery itself was killed, though three workers had to be pulled from the rubble after the wall collapsed. No word on whether or not they were seriously harmed.

There were reports after the accident of drunken crazies sprinting through the streets and filling up buckets and whatever they could grab in order to save as much beer as they could. Some people lapped up the beer with their hands and got so drunk that one person actually died of alcohol poisoning. Of course these reports are totally untrue and there’s no evidence at all that any of that happened, but again, most of these people were poor and Irish so there was loads of unfavorable shit talk coming at them from all directions at every opportunity.

Of course, the physical damage to the brewery was immense. It was such a catastrophic site that watchmen at the brewery charged people to come take a look at the mess. The initial beer explosion and subsequent beercano and beerlwhind took out support beams and more walls and the building was basically done for when all was said and done. Twenty three thousand pounds worth of damage was the final tally on the brewery alone. So the government took all their assets and sued them to fix the neighborhood and pay restitution to the families of those injured and killed. I’m just kidding. The Meux family was stupid rich, so they came out on top in the end.

The coroner’s inquest, along with a jury, declared the whole thing an “unavoidable act of God,” which is now a phrase I’m going to be using from now on any time I do anything undeniably stupid and clearly my fault, which is often.

The brewery came away with a nice chunk of insurance money and in additon was granted a sin tax refund from parliament. That major rush of cold, hard cash saved it from bankruptcy. Yay! Sin taxes, by the way, are excise taxes that are applied to certain goods and services like alcohol, tobacco products, and gambling that have an element of social harm associated with them, and they’re paid at the time of purchase. Sin taxes are supposed to discourage people from buying these things, especially lower-income demographics who don’t have the disposable doll hairs to just toss into the devil’s furnace. Advocates say that the specific items and activities taxed are things that create harm and that harm overflows unfairly throughout society at large, placing a burden on people not engaging with the specific risks to eventually deal with the consequences of those who do. Like covering the rising healthcare costs of smokers vs the general population. As far as I can tell, it does seem to work. For example, after implementing a sin tax on alcohol in Maryland, car crashes among drivers in the state aged 15-34 went down by 12%.

If you don’t know what an excise tax is, those are taxes paid to the resident country of the business when it makes a sale of certain goods or services. Drawback happens when those goods are unable to be used, in this case, since the porter was destroyed.

I went through the dismal torture of reading all about excise taxes and excise drawback for you, and sure, while also pounding these (holds up beer), but you’d just better appreciate that.

The only type of “consequences” you could come away with possibly having happened to the brewery was that they kind of quietly phased out those gigantic wooden aging vats. In fact, that happened across the entire industry afterward, and they were replaced by concrete-lined containers.

As for the relatives and families of the victims of the beer flood along with the residents of the houses that were damaged, well they got absolutely nothing from the government or the brewery at all. Some of them resorted to putting the bodies of their loved ones on display and charging visitors to see them in order to come away with any kind of restitution at all. In one horrific aftershock moment (beerftershock?), so many visitors were present at one of the houses while visiting the bodies that the floor collapsed and they all fell into the basement below, still filled to the brim with porter. I do wonder if they had to pay extra for the interactive version of the experience.

The mourners from the wake who died in the flood were given their own wake at The Ship public house on Bainbridge Street. The other bodies were laid out in a nearby yard by their families where the public came by to pay their respects, and also where collections were taken up with that money then given to the families. So there, it’s not just 21st-century America where people have to crowdfund for their own healthcare emergencies and funeral expenses. Take that Regency Era British poors.

The Horseshoe Brewery operated at the same location until 1921, at which point they were so flush with cash that they moved to a bigger facility. In 1961, the brewery was liquidated and acquired by Allied Breweries. The Dominion Theatre was then built on the site of the original brewery when it moved in 1921, and the theater is there to this day.

The beer didn’t fully drain away from St Giles for several weeks. The smell was absolutely overpowering. If you’ve ever been to one bar that’s older than a couple years, just think about that waftable stale beer scent multiplied by a factor of a million and permeating the entire city of London and the surrounding area for months.

Today, we have corporate negligence laws. Negligence occurs when there is no intent to harm, as opposed to committing a purposeful act or one with an established motive. These laws are in place to protect people from the very possibility of a “unavoidable act of God,” which I don’t think the London beer flood was entirely, but let’s not split hairy barrels of porter over it. And if a giant flood of delicious creamy beer took out a socio-economically distressed neighborhood inside a modern nation, I’d like to think that there would be significant consequences. But who knows? I’d guess the giant beverage conglomerates that own most every brewery these days would get a slap on the wrist and a token fine they’ve already budgeted for a million times over and then give their executive team huge bonuses and call it a day.

We can, of course, try to demand better of our public safety pillars and hold corporate interests accountable. That takes an engaged and informed populace with the motivation to take action and participate in civic responsibilities like voting, and supporting sane candidates and a stable government that wants to regulate the unchecked power of freewheeling executive psychopaths.

With the power vested in me by the sanctity of the spirit of the lingering beer smell some say still watches over the city of London to this day, I bequeath you with the ability to go forth and prevent these kinds of injust accidents and their repercussions going forward. I know we can do better with our collective willpower to protect our fellow citizens, especially the most vulnerable among us.

Let’s do some f*cking good about weird historical disasters.