1. Built environment
September 25, 2014

They’re building a 3km beer pipeline under Bruges

By City Monitor Staff

Drop everything, we all need to move to Bruges right now. The city is building a 3km pipeline for beer under the city, capable of transporting 6,000 litres of liquid an hour. For the non-numerical among you, that’s a lot of beer. Over 10,500 pints, in fact. And not a guilt-ridden Irish assassin in sight.

Tragically, the pipe won’t be delivering Belgian beer to taps in peoples’ homes: instead it’ll connect the De Halve Maam brewery to a bottling plant, and will replace the 500 tanker lorries required to transport the stuff each year at the moment.

In case you’re planning to construct something similar yourself, here are the specs. The pipe will be made from “high-quality plastic” (ooooh), and will be installed using computer-guided drilling. De Halve Maam will pay for the installation and maintenance of the pipe; construction will start next year.

Xavier Vanneste, the brewer’s chief executive, told Agence France-Presse that the pipe was going ahead because of “environmental and quality of life concerns, and not economic ones”. The aim is to keep heavy lorries off the city’s cobbled streets, while maintaining a steady flow of beer from barrel to bottle. Win-win.

Brewery image: Spotter2 at Wikimedia Commons.

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