On the face of it, sounds like the sort of event you might like to be involved in. Unlimited floods of beer cascading down.
But alas no. The incident that took place at the Horse Shoe Brewery in 1814 on Tottenham Court Road (where the Dominion Theatre now stands) tragically claimed eight lives, caused widescale damage and severe financial loss.
The brewery was owned by the Meux Brewery which at the time was of the two largest breweries in London (the other being Whitbread). They brewed only one beer. It was a dark strong beer called Porter and was the most popular alcoholic drink in the capital.
As the beer was left to mature for up to a year to produce the best quality, Henry Meux had ordered the construction of a massive wooden barrel, 6.7 metres high (22 ft), the equivalent of 18,000 imperial barrels of beer. So heavy and large was it, that 81 tons of iron hoops were used to strengthen the vat.
At the back of the brewery ran New Street, a small cul-de-sac that was part of the St Giles rookery, a poor slum area inhabited by many Irish families.
On 17th October, about 4.30 in the afternoon, George Crick, the storehouse clerk noticed that one of the iron hoops holding the barrel had slipped, but was told to pay no attention as that did happen a few times during the year.
But just an hour later and with no additional warning, the massive vessel burst, the power of the releasing liquid knocking the stopcock from a vat nearby, which also began to disgorge its contents.
The force of the beer destroyed the back wall and a massive wave of Porter beer some 4.6 metres high, swept into New Street flooding the small houses there. In one, a young girl and her mother drowned and in another where a wake was taking place, five mourners were killed. And in a nearby pub, a young servant girl died when a wall collapsed from the force of the flood.
Afterwards, the jury at the coroner’s inquest, returned a verdict that the eight had lost their lives “casually, accidentally and by misfortune”.
The company were saved from bankruptcy by not having to pay compensation, as it was declared by the coroner as an ‘Act of God’
One significant result of the accident, large wooden tanks were phased out across the brewing industry, to be replaced with lined concrete vessels.
Image coutesy of Wikipedia. Horseshoe Brewery, London, c. 1800. Source Brewers’ Journal, 15 February 1906, p 55. Author unknown.