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You think you want to die that way, but drowning in beer is still drowning. I’ve come close enough off the coast of Acapulco that I’m not anxious to go that way, whether the liquid filling my lungs has barley and hops in it or not. Eight people died in the London Beer Flood, and since they’re dead we can’t ask them if it’s better than drowning in regular water. I assume it still sucks.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: October 17, 1814--
It was called the Horse Shoe Brewery, and it had been in business in central London for half a century. On the afternoon of October 17, 1814, a clerk noticed a problem with one of the vats. Standing 22 feet tall and filled to the brim with 33 tons of 10-month-old porter, one of the vat’s iron bands containing the behemoth of beer had slipped. The bands themselves weighed 700 pounds, and slipping was not uncommon. The clerk informed the supervisor, who told him to chill the fuck out. His exact words were, “No harm whatsoever would ensue.” Yeah, he was wrong.
The plan was to fix it later, but later wouldn’t arrive. The band fell off, and with no warning the vat burst. This took out another vat to double the drunken drowning pleasure, and in all a few hundred thousand gallons of beer were released, destroying the back wall of the brewery and sending a 15-foot-high wave of suds down the street.
The deluge destroyed two houses and badly damaged two others. Five of the eight killed were attending an Irish wake for a two-year-old boy. Those inside the brewery survived but had to be pulled from the rubble.
Stories arose of hundreds of people gathering up the spilled beer, followed by much public drunkenness, but these were salacious rumors intended to slight the large Irish immigrant population in the neighborhood. No such revelry was reported by any credible source.
The brewery narrowly escaped insolvency, and the incident resulted in the phasing out of large wooden vats for containing beer.
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