Beer kegs are usually where the fun begins. They’re wheeled into bars, loaded into coolers, hauled to backyard parties and tapped at breweries, and nobody gives much thought to what is happening inside that stainless steel cylinder.

There is, after all, just beer in there.

Except there isn’t just beer in there. There is also pressure, and history has produced some sobering reminders of what can happen when that pressure gets out of control.

One of the earliest and most spectacular examples wasn’t technically a keg explosion, but it remains one of the great beer disasters of all time. On October 17, 1814, a massive wooden vat at London’s Horse Shoe Brewery ruptured, releasing more than 135,000 imperial gallons of porter. The resulting wave destroyed nearby buildings and killed eight people.

The London Beer Flood happened more than a century before today’s stainless steel kegs became standard, but the basic lesson remains relevant. Beer stored under pressure can be dangerous when the equipment holding it fails.

Modern kegs are designed specifically to handle pressure, and catastrophic failures are extremely rare. But they have happened, sometimes with devastating consequences.

One of the clearest examples occurred in New Hampshire in 2012.

On April 24, Benjamin Harris, an employee at Redhook Brewery in Portsmouth, was cleaning a plastic root beer keg with compressed air. According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the keg reached 125 pounds per square inch, more than twice the 60 psi pressure OSHA cited as appropriate for the keg. The keg ruptured into multiple pieces, striking Harris in the head and chest. He died from his injuries.

OSHA subsequently cited Redhook’s parent company, Craft Brew Alliance, with multiple alleged serious safety violations. The incident eventually became the subject of a wrongful-death lawsuit, with Harris’ family later receiving a $1.2 million settlement.

The Harris case is particularly important because it wasn’t a keg mysteriously exploding in a bar. It was a workplace accident involving compressed air and a container that was never meant to be pressurized that way.

The physics were unforgiving.

Another tragic example occurred in Brazil in 2021, and this one happened at what should have been a very ordinary beer occasion.

On September 17, Gilson do Nascimento was celebrating his 43rd birthday at his home in Campo Bom, in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. He had rented a beer keg for the party, but something wasn’t right. Instead of beer, the tap was producing mostly foam.

Nascimento tried to troubleshoot the problem.

The keg suddenly exploded, sending metal fragments into him and causing fatal injuries.

At first, reports differed over exactly what went wrong. But a subsequent forensic investigation found that the keg itself was not defective. Investigators concluded that a failure in the pressure-reducing valve allowed the full pressure through, causing the keg to rupture. The owner of the company that supplied the equipment was later indicted on an involuntary manslaughter charge.

It is a particularly unsettling reminder that a problem at the tap can be more than an inconvenience.

Then there was New Milford, Connecticut, in 2006.

On October 22, a crowd gathered for an outdoor party where fires had been built in barrels to keep people warm. At some point, witnesses said, someone threw what appeared to be a quarter-keg of beer into one of the fires.

The result was a violent explosion.

Twenty-two-year-old Sean M. Caselli was killed after a piece of metal struck him in the neck. Seven other people were taken to hospitals with burns and shrapnel injuries. The blast was reportedly loud enough to rattle the surrounding area.

The case was eventually closed without criminal charges. But it remains one of the clearest demonstrations of what happens when a pressurized metal keg is exposed to extreme heat.

The keg doesn’t have to be defective. It doesn’t have to be old. It doesn’t even have to be connected to a dispensing system.

Put a sealed pressure vessel into a fire and the consequences can be catastrophic.

That particular danger even made its way into popular science television. In an episode of “MythBusters,” the hosts tested whether a beer keg could explode with lethal force after being placed in a fire. The test was deemed plausible after the keg ruptured violently, with the show noting that shrapnel from a more powerful failure could potentially be deadly.

The Connecticut tragedy demonstrated that this wasn’t merely television physics.

Keg accidents can also happen during the seemingly routine act of tapping a beer.

In October 2014, a 23-year-old man at the Bar Beach Bowling Club in Newcastle, Australia, was attempting to tap a keg when it exploded. The man suffered devastating injuries and lost an arm. Police said he had been working with the keg inside the club’s cool room.

And then there is a case that, at least as of this week, is bringing the subject back into the news.

In October 2022, Steven Garrand, a 42-year-old elementary school physical education teacher, was at Bar Fiasco in New York City’s Hamilton Heights neighborhood when an exploding keg allegedly caused severe injuries. Garrand has now filed a lawsuit seeking damages from the incident. The bar has not publicly commented on the case.

That incident is especially interesting because it wasn’t a brewery accident, a keg being thrown into a fire or somebody deliberately misusing pressure equipment. According to the lawsuit reporting, Garrand was simply at a bar when the keg exploded.

There are older examples, too.

In 1971, William Orlosky, a 31-year-old grounds manager at a Long Island country club, was killed in an accident involving a keg and compressed gas. According to contemporary reporting cited in recent coverage, Orlosky was thrown roughly 150 feet and suffered fatal head injuries.

Taken together, these incidents show that there isn’t one single way for a beer keg to become dangerous.

Sometimes the problem is excessive pressure. Sometimes it is a failed valve. Sometimes compressed air is used incorrectly. Sometimes a keg is exposed to extreme heat. And sometimes the exact circumstances surrounding an accident are difficult to establish.

What they all have in common is stored energy.

A modern beer keg is essentially a pressure vessel. Carbon dioxide is used to carbonate beer and, in most draft systems, to push that beer from the keg toward the faucet. The pressure is normally controlled by regulators and the keg is designed to withstand the conditions associated with draft service.

That is why catastrophic keg explosions are so uncommon despite the enormous number of kegs in circulation.

But uncommon isn’t the same thing as impossible.

And there is a tendency among beer drinkers to think of a keg as little more than a giant beer bottle. That is understandable. Most people encounter kegs at parties or bars, not in a brewery safety meeting.

Brewers and draft professionals see things differently.

They know that damaged kegs need to be removed from service. They know that pressure needs to be controlled. They know that compressed air is not interchangeable with the gases used in normal draft service. They know that heat and sealed containers are a bad combination. And they know that a keg should never be treated as something indestructible simply because it is made of stainless steel.

The history of exploding kegs is ultimately a history of pressure and human beings underestimating it.

From the London Beer Flood in 1814 to the Redhook Brewery tragedy in 2012, from a birthday party in Brazil to a bar in New York City, the circumstances have changed but the underlying lesson hasn’t.

A keg may contain one of the world’s great beverages, but it is still a pressurized container.

Most of the time, it does exactly what we want it to do. It keeps the beer cold, carbonated and ready to pour.

And that familiar hiss when the keg is tapped is a reminder that there is a little more going on inside than just beer waiting for a glass.

There is pressure.

And pressure deserves respect.

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(Images generated by Gemini AI)