Meux’s Horse Shoe brewery, Tottenham Court Road
Toward the end of September, we posted about Matson’s molasses spill in Hawaii and then the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. We would be remiss if we did not also post about the London Beer Flood which occurred on this day, 199 years ago. It was not strictly a nautical event but as beer is always of interest to sailors, we consider it to be close enough. (For the sake of propriety we will not post about the Pig Manure Flood in the German village of Elsa in 2006.)
It is not easy to separate fact from fiction in the accounts of the London Beer Flood of 1814. The bare-bones facts seem to be that a vat of porter containing 3,555 barrels of beer, burst suddenly at around 5:30 PM on Monday October 17, 1814, in Henry Meux’s Horse Shoe Brewery in the parish of St. Giles, London, England. Eight people, all women and children in tenements adjacent to the brewery, are believed to have died in the flood of more than 570 tonnes of beer.
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