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 22-foot-tall wooden vats of fermenting porter burst. Between 128,000 and 323,000 imperial gallons of beer were released in total. Eight people were killed, five of them mourners at the wake being held by an Irish family for a two-year-old boy.
About London Beer Flood in brief
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 22-foot-tall wooden vats of fermenting porter burst. Between 128,000 and 323,000 imperial gallons 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 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 vat after the accident; the brewery moved in 1921, and the Dominion Theatre is now where the brewery used to stand. In the early nineteenth century the Meux Brewery was one of two largest in London, along with Whitbread.
In 1809 Sir Henry Meux purchased the Horse Sh shoe Brewery, at the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, and brewed only porter, a dark beer that was first brewed in London and was the most popular alcoholic drink in the capital. At the rear of the horse shoe Brewery ran New Street, a small cul-de-sac that joined on to Dyott Street. The rookery, which covered anArea of eight acres, was a perpetually decaying slum seemingly always on the verge of social and economic collapse, according to Richard Kirkland, the professor of Irish literature. The force of the liquid’s release knocked the stopcock from a neighbouring vat, which also began discharging its contents; several hogsheads of p Porter were destroyed, and their contents to the flood.
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This page is based on the article London Beer Flood published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 29, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
