Belgian Brewery Has First-Ever Two-Mile Beer Pipeline

It may have all the markings of an urban legend, but De Halve Maan brewery is making a beer lover’s fantasy come true with the construction of an underground pipeline that carries suds from the center of Bruges to a bottling plant outside the city. Measuring about two miles long, the pipeline pumps beer faster than 1,000 gallons an hour.

A truck pumping beer is parked outside at the Halve Maan Brewery in Bruges, Belgium on Thursday, May 26, 2016. The use of trucks will soon be a thing of the past as the brewery has recently created a beer pipeline which will ship beer straight from the brewery to the bottling plant, two kilometers away, through underground pipes running between the two sources. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

AP

However novel it may sound, the project is more prosaic than anything. For 160 years, the Maes family has been brewing beer in the center of the city. When the company moved their bottling plant just outside the city limits, beer had to be transported to and from the plant in massive tanker trucks through narrow, cobblestoned streets.

Beer flowing from a tap (Getty Images)

Getty Images

In order to continue operating as one of the last remaining breweries in Bruges without becoming a town nuisance, the family decided to build the pipeline and launched a crowdfunding campaign to fund it. The project was pitched as “social project” for the good of locals with the promise of free beer to their biggest donors.

The appeal worked, and locals contributed $4.5 million to fund the construction. The pipeline is estimated to take 500 tankers a year off the road.

Earlier this year, the Slovenian city of Zalec also made headlines when city officials voted in favor of building a beer fountain, to promote the city’s primary economic activity: hop plantations.

Plans call for the beer fountain to be erected in the town square, where visitors will be entitled to three servings for 6 euros, in a commemorative mug. –Relaxnews