The London Beer Flood was an accident at Meux & Co's Horse Shoe Brewery, London, on 17 October 1814. It took place when one of the wooden vats of fermenting porter burst. The escaping liquid dislodged the valve of another vessel and destroyed several large barrels: between 128,000 and 323,000 imperial gallons (580,000–1,470,000 L; 154,000–388,000 US gal) of beer were released in total.
The resulting wave of porter destroyed the back wall of the brewery and swept into an area of slum dwellings known as the St Giles rookery. Eight people were killed, five of them mourners at the wake being held by an Irish family for a two-year-old boy. The coroner's inquest returned a verdict that the eight had lost their lives "casually, accidentally and by misfortune". The brewery was nearly bankrupted by the event; it avoided collapse after a rebate from HM Excise on the lost beer. The brewing industry gradually stopped using large wooden vats after the accident. The brewery moved in 1921, and the Dominion Theatre is now where the brewery used to stand. Meux & Co went into liquidation in 1961.
Background
In the early nineteenth century the Meux Brewery was one of the two largest in London, along with Whitbread. In 1809 Sir Henry Meux purchased the Horse Shoe Brewery, at the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street. Meux's father, Sir Richard Meux, had previously co-owned the Griffin Brewery in Liquor-Pond Street (now Clerkenwell Road), in which he had constructed the largest vat in London, capable of holding 20,000 imperial barrels.
Henry Meux emulated his father's large vat, and constructed a wooden vessel tall and capable of holding 18,000 imperial barrels. of iron hoops were used to strengthen the vat. Meux brewed only porter, a dark beer that was first brewed in London and was the most popular alcoholic drink in the capital. Meux & Co brewed 102,493 imperial barrels in the twelve months up to July 1812. Porter was left in the large vessels to mature for several months, or up to a year for the best quality versions.
At the rear of the brewery ran New Street, a small cul-de-sac that joined on to Dyott Street; this was within the St Giles rookery. The rookery, which covered an area of , "was a perpetually decaying slum seemingly always on the verge of social and economic collapse", according to Richard Kirkland, the professor of Irish literature. Thomas Beames, the preacher of Westminster St James, and author of the 1852 work The Rookeries of London: Past, Present and Prospective, described the St Giles rookery as "a rendezvous of the scum of society"; the area had been the inspiration for William Hogarth's 1751 print Gin Lane.
17 October 1814
At around 4:30 in the afternoon of 17 October 1814, George Crick, Meux's storehouse clerk, saw that one of the iron bands around a vat had slipped. The tall vessel was filled to within of the top with 3,555 imperial barrels of ten-month-old porter. As the bands slipped off the vats two or three times a year, Crick was unconcerned. He told his supervisor about the problem, but was told "that no harm whatever would ensue". Crick was told to write a note to Mr Young, one of the partners of the brewery, to have it fixed later.
An hour after the hoop fell off, Crick was standing on a platform from the vat, holding the note to Mr Young, when the vessel, with no indication, burst. The force of the liquid's release knocked the stopcock from a neighbouring vat, which also began discharging its contents; several hogsheads of porter were destroyed, and their contents added to the flood. Between 128,000 and 323,000 imperial gallons were released. The force of the liquid destroyed the rear wall of the brewery; it was high and two and a half bricks thick. Some of the bricks from the back wall were knocked upwards, and fell onto the roofs of the houses in the nearby Great Russell Street.