Remembering the day that beer killed 20 people

Nearly 200 years ago today, a disaster at a London brewery launched a tsunami that touched off riots in its wake and left 20 people dead including several who drowned in beer.

On Oct. 16, 1814, a worker at Meux Reid Co.’s Horse Shoe Brewery overlooked a crack in one of the 500-pound cast-iron bands binding a 22-foot-high vat full of ale. It was one of 29 hoops securing the wooden storage vessels, the worker reasoned, so a little crack shouldn’t be a problem.

An hour later the vat burst with a crash that could be heard for miles. The 125,000-gallon wave of dark porter ale and shattered staves burst another vat holding 25,000 gallons of porter then blasted through the 25-foot-high brewery wall built with foot-thick bricks.

Next door on Trottenham Court Road, a Mrs. Barfield was serving tea when the beer wave hit her home. She escaped, but her 4-year-old daughter and two guests drowned.

The river of beer devastated the neighboring community of mostly poor people, flooding houses, shops and taverns. Attempts to help the wounded often were hampered by people scrambling for the free beer. Mobs formed over beer puddles. More than a dozen more people died in the madness.

Patients at the local hospital began rioting when the smell from the beer-soaked injured touched off a rumor that the staff was holding back on the patients’ presumed beer ration.

It got worse. At the morgue, someone started charging admission for the public to view the disaster victims. People packed the room, causing the floor to collapse. More people died.

The official inquest ruled the incident was an accident. But it was an accident waiting to happen, the byproduct of the bigger-is-better ethos of the Industrial Revolution that simply grew out of control.

At the time, porter was all the rage and English breweries expanded quickly in an effort to reap unprecedented profits. Bigger wooden aging vats were the solution that helped push porter production to more than 7 million gallons a year.

The competition touched off what only can be described as a case of vat envy. Henry Thrale grabbed headlines when he premiered one of his huge vats with a seated dinner inside for 100 people. Meux responded with a vat that was 60 feet wide and 23 feet high. Two hundred were seated inside for its premiere gala dinner.

The disaster did not cool the industry’s ardor for giant fermenting vessels. When Samuel Whitbread opened his state-of-the-art porter brewery in 1842, its storage cisterns could hold 124,000 gallons of porter.

But fortunately, the Meux brewery disaster and its horrific aftermath would not be repeated.

This story is based on accounts by Alan Eames in his book “Secret Life of Beer,” and Roger Protz in his book “The Ale Trail.”