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Thursday 28 August  

WineDater visits Fullers Brewery  

On Friday 2nd May Nic and Nigel from WineDater took a trip down to Fullers Brewery to see where London gets it's Pride from!

We started the tour off with a quick tasting of their best selling, London Pride, along with a few other delicate ales including Fullers Honeydew which is a fantastic thirst quencher for a summers day.

Our guide then lead us around the prestine vats and tanks of the main brewery where he has worked for over 40 years.  As you can imagine he was a real character and had a few stories to tell, one of which recounted how Alan the Gallon would consume a tidy 15 pints a day whilst at work!!  Needless to say that the Fullers Brewery is now dry and no drinking (by staff) takes place on the premisis.

Ever wondered where the phrase 'Getting Plastered' comes from?  The bags of Gypsum they use to put in the water in the beer making process resembles a bag of plaster; not as exciting as you’d hope. Slightly more so is that the Trent River has plenty of Gypsum in its water hence beer was and is a big business in this area.
Also visiting the brewery that day were a group of vicors and a stag party with a large blow up palm tree, so don't worry if you think you might feel out of place here, you won't!

The Brewery is based in Chiswick, for further information on tours visit www.fullers.co.uk

 

Death by Beer
The London Beer Flood of 1814

This is an extract from 'Man Walks into a Pub' by Pete Brown, we thought it was funny so hopefully you will too.

In 1760 Sam Whitbread made his already impressive Chiswell Street Brewery even more fantastic with the addition of the Porter Tun room. The room was a feat in itself, with tourist guides at the time marvelling, 'the unsupported roof span… is exceeded in its majestic size only by that of Westminster Hall'. And it was dominated by a giant beer vat. 

The gauntlet had been thrown down. Proving that phallic substitutes among powerful men predate the arrival of bright red sports cars, rival brewer Henry Thrale built a new porter vat and celebrated its completion by having a hundred people sit down to dinner inside it. 'Right then, you b@stard,' thought the Meux brewery, who went off and built one sixty feet wide and twenty-three feet high. They had two hundred guests to dinner in that one. Just to make sure everyone knew who was boss, they soon added a second one which was almost as large.
 
The contest reached its conclusion with the Meux's Horse Shoe Brewery tragedy in 1814. The brewery's vat, which stood on the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, held over a million pints of porter. It was made of wood and held together by twenty-nine gigantic iron hoops. One day a workman noticed a crack in one of the hoops. As each hoop weighed over 500 pounds he thought a little crack was nothing to worry about, and he forgot about it. A few hours later there was an explosion so loud it was heard five miles away. The vat had burst, and the force of the jet stream of beer crushed the second vat. This meant the more beer than you can possibly imagine jetted out under very high pressure. The twenty-five-foot high, one-foot-thick, solid brick wall of the brewery stood no chance. It was flattened, and a tidal wave of beer raged into the surrounding streets.
 
The first to die were those drowned by the initial wave. Others were crushed to death in the stampede as they threw themselves into the gutter to drink as much free beer as they were physically able, hampering any hope of rescue for those trapped in the rubble. Some of those who survived the crush subsequently died of alcohol poisoning. The survivors were taken to hospital, but they weren't out of it yet. They reeked of beer, and those patients already on the wards rioted because they thought patients in other parts of the hospital were being served beer while their own doctors were holding out on them. Finally, there were still further casualties when the dead were taken to a nearby house and laid out for identification by grieving relatives. Everyone one was curious to see what victims of death by beer looked like, so they crowded into the house for a look, and the owners even began charging admission. Soon there were so many people in the house that the floor collapsed, and several of those who had gone to look at the dead, ended up joining them!

 

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