Yesterday We Made A Post,

about how too much of something can kill you,

and then today I read about how too much beer killed 8 people, it was the London Beer Flood, an October 1814 industrial disaster that sent a 15-foot high tsunami of beer sweeping through the streets after a giant vat of porter at the Horse Shoe Brewery broke, the reason the vat was so large was that large vats were almost a tourist attraction, and for the brewery's they could claim to have bragging rights over the size of their vats, “It is thought that one of the most spectacular sights, certainly at the major London porter breweries, was the sheer size of the storage vats, much kudos being attached to the brewer in possession of the largest example,” writes author Ian S. Hornsey in A History of Beer and Brewing, in 1763, vats capable of holding 1,500 barrels each were installed in breweries in London, and vats only continued to get bigger until the beer flood, as beer historian Martyn Cornell points out, the beer vat that broke at the Horse Shoe Brewery wasn’t even the biggest one there, while historians differ on exactly how much the broken vat held (somewhere between 3,500 and 7,500 barrels) a contemporary writer who Cornell quotes says that the brewery’s largest held 18,000 barrels and had eighty tons of iron holding it together,

Horse Shoe Brewery was located in St. Giles Rookery, a poor area where many of the city’s most vulnerable lived in crowded underground cellars, and because it happened on a Monday afternoon, men and boys of working age were away from the area at their jobs, writes History.com, meaning the victims were children and women, sad, regrettable and avoidable if action had been taken earlier to mend the broken hoop or drained the vat, but there it is too much of anything can kill you!