Verbatim: Three Boys Porter. One of very-few good things about Christchurch, these guys make a lovely few brews, and the porter is an especially good way to end your evening.

Afterthoughts, October 2010: Firstly, I can’t believe I actually drank something else after the Skull Splitter. No wonder I didn’t actually write anything down for this one. I probably couldn’t. Secondly, damn the lighting in this pub used to be a lot uglier (he writes, as he sits at the bar after work and tinkers with his webthing).

But thirdly, the Porter Flood. The text on the label reads, in part:

Such was the popularity of porter in old England that legend has it townsfolk drowned when vats at a local brewery burst, flooding the streets.

Which always struck me as tosh. (And there is a lot of nonsense, in the historical ‘legends’ surrounding beer and brewing; we’ll get to a lot of those, eventually.) But I was delighted to discover that I had under-estimated the weirdness of the world. The porter flood actually happened, just a bit more than 196 years ago in London, when the maturing tank (a behemoth of a thing, at several hundred thousand litres) burst at the Horse Shoe Brewery. The ensuing carnage claimed a few lives, and a few buildings. It must’ve been insane.

Since the anniversary (October 17) of the event happens to be so coincidentally close to the time when I’m writing this, a useful piece recently popped up in a local(ish) paper; it’s worth a read.

After-afterthoughts, still October, still 2010: I’ve stumbled upon an excellent beer blog, Zythophile, and found that the writer there has very nicely covered the story of the Flood, in a book of his and a follow-up posting. Even more worth a read.