Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast · Brad Choma

The Beer & Whiskey Flood Drinking Disastersode of 1814-1875 | Episode 91

·1 hr 1 min·4 clips

A 15-foot wave of black beer burst through the brewhouse and demolished nearby houses.

The host opens by framing the London beer flood of 1814 as one of history's more traumatic, bizarre, and mostly forgotten disasters. The story feels absurd right up until the damage comes into focus. A brewhouse failure sends beer surging into St. Giles, and the episode keeps returning to the uneasy blend of spectacle and catastrophe that followed. One blunt aside about a barrel of feces and a drop of wine becomes the lesson of the hour: it does not take much to spoil a thing. That idea fits the flood. The narration stays with the people around it, including a remarkably composed crowd, curious onlookers, and the people who reportedly paid a small entrance fee to visit the smashed brewhouse. Bodies were laid out in the grim Victorian custom of public viewing, and that spectacle was free. Claims of alcohol-poisoning deaths are treated carefully, with the host saying he could not really prove them and chalking them up to exaggerated newspaper reporting. Before long, the brewery recovered and kept operating, while St. Giles slowly got back to drowning in debt instead of beer. The episode ends by widening the lens: the flood is now remembered with a smirk, the old slums have been redeveloped, and the real takeaway is that you do not have to work inside an industrial plant to be killed by it.

As heard by us

A grim, sharply told disaster story that treats a strange urban accident with real seriousness.

The London beer flood of 1814 comes across as a disaster story first and a joke only in the distance. It keeps its attention on the damage, the bodies, the crowd that turned up to look, and the brewery's uneasy recovery after the shock had passed.

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Why you'd press play

Play this when beer should stay in glasses, not flood a neighborhood.

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