A beer flood, a royal ban on coffee houses, a fighter-jet claim and a forged bottle all reached a verdict on paper, and the paper tells a different story from the legend.
At about half past four on 17 October 1814, a storehouse clerk named George Crick looked down at a three-storey vat of porter in a brewery in London’s St Giles and noticed that a 700-pound iron hoop had slipped off it. This happened two or three times a year, and his superior told him no harm would follow, suggesting he write a note to the man who could mend it later. Crick wrote the note. An hour or so afterwards the vat burst, and the weight of the beer smashed through neighbouring casks and out into streets with no drains.
Drinks history is usually told as a string of anecdotes, each with a punchline attached. This piece follows five of them back to the documents they produced: an inquest verdict, a royal proclamation, a court opinion, a lease and a set of forged engravings. In every case the paperwork decided who paid, who was allowed to carry on and what the story was worth, and in several the document says something quite different from the version repeated at the bar. That matters to anyone selling drinks today, because promotions, provenance claims and property terms still end up in front of someone who has to read them literally.
What the jury decided
The flood killed eight women and children in the poor, largely Irish streets around the brewery, and two days later a jury visited the site, viewed the bodies and heard Crick and others. Its verdict was that the deaths had come about by misfortune and an Act of God, which meant nobody owed the families anything. The brewery then won something further, a waiver from Parliament on the excise duty it had already paid on beer that was now running through St Giles. A broken hoop that the company’s own staff knew about, and had scheduled for later attention, left the firm better off than the people whose cellars filled. The record of that week is mostly a record of who was excused.
A ban that never took effect
Charles II’s proclamation against coffee houses, dated 29 December 1675, is an unusually plain document. It said the houses had multiplied, drawn idle and disaffected people and spread false and malicious reports against the government, and it forbade anyone from selling coffee, chocolate, sherbet or tea for drinking on the premises after 10 January. The mechanism was the licence, which justices of the peace were told to recall and never to grant again, so the whole trade depended on a permission the Crown could in theory cancel. Then a second proclamation on 8 January 1676 withdrew the first, two days before it was due to bite.
The order form
The Pepsi case rests on a catalogue. In a Pacific North West test market between October 1995 and March 1996, the Pepsi Stuff promotion let drinkers collect points and redeem them from a catalogue of 53 items running from a 15-point jacket tattoo to a 3,300-point mountain bike, and extra points could be bought at ten cents each provided an order carried at least 15 original points. A Seattle resident, John Leonard, saw a commercial in which a teenager lands a Harrier jet at school beside a caption pricing it at seven million points. He raised about $700,000 through acquaintances, and on or about 27 March 1996 he sent an order form, 15 original points and a cheque for $700,008.50, writing the jet in at the bottom of the form himself.
Pepsi’s fulfilment house returned the cheque in May with some coupons, saying the jet was not in the catalogue and had been put in the advert as a joke. Leonard’s lawyers answered that the commercial offered it plainly, and he argued that the jet was shown in exactly the same way as the T-shirt and the sunglasses, that Pepsi’s own press release called it the ultimate prize, and that a jury of fellow members of the Pepsi generation, rather than a judge, should decide whether the offer was serious. It was not a frivolous argument, because courts have held advertisers to their words in reward cases and in some sales. After three years of procedural wrangling, Judge Kimba Wood ruled against him on 5 August 1999 for three separate reasons: an advert is not an offer, no reasonable person would have read it as one, and there was no signed writing to satisfy the law on large sales of goods.
The judge also did the arithmetic. Seven million points meant drinking roughly 190 Pepsis a day for a century or buying about $700,000 of points, while she put the price of a Harrier at around $23 million, a figure Leonard’s own business plan had acknowledged. Pepsi had also re-cut the commercial to ask for 700 million points, and Leonard offered that as proof the original was serious, but the court said it could as easily show Pepsi feared frivolous litigation.
A cellar behind a wall
In 1985 a bottle sold at auction in London was said to have been bought in Paris by Thomas Jefferson in the late 1780s, and the story drew bidders who wanted a link to the third president. The American collector Bill Koch later bought four bottles from the same consignor and, growing suspicious, traced them to the German collector Rodenstock, Hardy Rodenstock. Rodenstock’s account was that a number of bottles, which he never counted, had been found behind a brick wall in a cellar in the Marais district of Paris.
Koch’s staff then did what the story had never required of anyone, which was to check it against records. Researchers at Jefferson’s own home found that the bottles matched neither his Paris purchase records nor the objects dug up on the estate, and Jefferson, it turned out, had never lived anywhere near the Marais. A retired master engraver, recommended by a glass museum, concluded that the initials on one bottle had been cut with an electric drill rather than the copper wheel an eighteenth-century craftsman would have used.
Koch sued Rodenstock for fraud in August 2006, and Rodenstock, who also used the name Meinhard Goerke, declined to take part, so Koch won by default. A default judgment shows that a claim went uncontested, not that a court weighed the evidence, so the engraving and the records at Jefferson’s home remain the stronger case. The cellar story only worked as long as nobody asked for a receipt.
The lease nobody needed
On 31 December 1759 Arthur Guinness signed a lease on a disused brewery at St James’s Gate in Dublin. The term was 9,000 years, with £100 paid up front and £45 a year after that for a site of about four acres. It was a bargain in the plainest sense, struck during a financial scare that had left Dublin property cheap. The lease did not last, however. Guinness grew well past those four acres and bought the property outright, which left the 9,000-year term redundant, a document written for a future measured in millennia and set aside because the business needed more than it covered.
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