October 17, 1814. London, near Tottenham Court Road. A huge vat of porter collapses, sending a flood of beer into the surrounding tenements, killing eight, all women and children.

There are a lot of myths surrounding that almost-200-year-old tragedy. (Plenty of jokes, too. Being washed away by a tsunami of beer sounds like something from a Family Guy episode.) But what really happened?

My favorite beer historian Martyn Cornell, the Zythophile, has a long and fascinating piece on the events of that day and the history leading up to it.

So what REALLY happened on October 17 1814?

The first hint of what was going to happen occurred at around half past four in the afternoon of Monday October 17 1814, when a seven-hundredweight iron hoop, the smallest of 22 securing a 22-feet-high vat in the storehouse at the back of the brewery, and about three feet from the bottom of the vat, fell off. The vat was filled within four inches of the top with 3,555 barrels of “entire”, porter already 10 months old and destined to be sent out when judged properly mature to be mixed with freshly brewed porter to customers’ tastes, in Meux’s pubs. George Crick, the storehouse clerk, who was on duty at the time, told the inquest held into the deaths of the victims of the disaster that he was “not alarmed” at the hoop falling off as it happened “frequently”, two or three times a year, and was “not attended by any serious consequence”. Nevertheless, Crick said, he wrote a note to Florance Young, one of the brewery partners, who ran a back-making (that is, brewery vessel making) business, to let him know what had happened, so that someone would come to mend the hoop.

At 5.30pm Crick was standing just a short distance from the vat in question, with the note for Young in his hand, when he heard the vat burst. He ran to the storehouse where the vat was, and was shocked to see that the end wall, at least 25 feet high, 60 feet long and 22 inches thick at its broadest part, together with a large part of the roof, lay in ruins. The force of the escaping beer, and flying debris, including the huge staves of the collapsing vat, smashed several hogsheads of porter in the storehouse and knocked the cock out of another large vat in the cellar below which contained 2,100 barrels of beer, all of which except 800 or 900 barrels joined the flood.

A couple of hours later and the men would have been home from work and the tragedy would have been that much worse. Imagine if it had been in the wee hours of the morning.

This is definitely worth your time to read.