The Soho Brewery Whose Workers Did Not Die in the 1854 Cholera Outbreak Because They Drank Beer Instead of Water

The Lion Brewery on Broad Street in Soho — a substantial London brewery owned and operated by Edward Huggins — stood approximately thirty metres from the contaminated water pump at the corner of Broad Street and Cambridge Street. The pump killed approximately 500 people in the Soho cholera outbreak of August–September 1854.

None of the brewery’s seventy workers died.

John Snow noticed the anomaly during his door-to-door survey of the affected neighbourhood in early September 1854. He visited Huggins at the brewery and asked specifically about the workers’ water consumption. Huggins gave him the answer that has substantively defined the Lion Brewery’s place in the history of epidemiology:

The workers did not drink water. They drank beer. Each man was given a daily allowance of approximately four pints of the brewery’s malt liquor as part of his wages — a standard 19th-century brewery practice for the trade. The water needed for the daily brewing came from the brewery’s own well, drilled approximately 15 metres into the chalk substrate underneath the building rather than from the contaminated Soho surface water that the Broad Street pump was tapping.

The exemption was substantively epidemiological proof. The Broad Street pump’s water contained the cholera bacterium (the actual identification of Vibrio cholerae would not come until Pacini in 1854 and Koch in 1883, and Snow’s 1854 work was substantively on epidemiological-statistical grounds alone). The Lion Brewery workers did not drink Broad Street water. They did not contract cholera. The contaminated-water theory of cholera transmission — the substantive Snow hypothesis that the entire German-French medical establishment of the period was ignoring — was substantively confirmed by the brewery’s seventy uninfected workers.

The brewing process

The substantial beer-versus-water question deserves a brief technical note. Was the Lion Brewery beer itself safe because of the brewing process, or was the workers’ exemption an effect of the brewery’s separate water source?

The substantive answer is both. The brewing process — boiling the wort during mash-and-sparge, then fermenting with alcohol-producing yeast — would have killed any Vibrio cholerae in the brewing water through approximately a dozen substantive mechanisms (thermal kill from boiling, hostile pH from fermentation acids, hostile osmotic pressure from sugars, ethanol toxicity from the fermented product). The Lion Brewery beer was therefore substantively safe regardless of its source water.

The brewery’s separate well was also independently safe. The cholera contamination of the Broad Street pump came from a leaking cesspit approximately three feet behind the pump well (specifically the cesspit of 40 Broad Street, where a Lewis-family infant had died of cholera in late August and her diapers had been emptied into the substantial cesspit). The Lion Brewery’s well was substantively deeper and was located approximately forty metres away from the contaminated cesspit, on the opposite side of the brewery building. It substantively drew uncontaminated water.

Snow’s On the Mode of Communication of Cholera (1855) cites the Lion Brewery exemption as one of his strongest pieces of natural-experimental evidence.

What the brewery did with the famous distinction

Huggins continued to operate the Lion Brewery for approximately a further decade. The brewery substantively did not capitalise commercially on its substantive epidemiological-historical role; the Lion brand did not market itself on its 1854 cholera exemption. The brewery was substantively absorbed into a larger London brewing concern in 1865 and the brewery building was demolished in 1881.

The pump itself — the cause of the outbreak — substantively survived. A modern replica stands at the site (the corner of Broadwick Street, as Broad Street was renamed in 1936) with a brass plaque commemorating the Snow pump-handle intervention. The accompanying public house, the John Snow pub, is approximately fifteen metres from the pump-replica and is substantively the substantive principal modern memorial to the 1854 outbreak.

The pub serves beer.