Under Bruges

A Belgian Town Is Building an Underground Beer Pipeline — What Could Go Wrong?

Tap that.
Tap that. Photo: Shutterstock

Ralph Fiennes, or at least the gangster he played in In Bruges, will be delighted to learn that Belgium’s Venice is set to become even more of “a fairytale town” with the addition of many thousands of gallons of beer flowing daily under its streets. The city has green-lit a three-kilometer pipeline connecting the historic Brouwerij De Halve Maan to its bottling plant, which has the misfortune of being located on the 500-year-old town’s outskirts.

The city is one giant landmark to begin with, and the point of the pipeline, the brewery’s CEO says, is to essentially rid the medieval cobblestone streets of delivery trucks — 500 of them annually, they estimate, or roughly 85 percent of Bruges’s truck traffic. Beer will take 10 to 15 minutes to travel the polyethylene pipeline. The brewery calls it “win-win” for everybody, though it’s likely locals imagine a different kind of victory lying right at their feet. Tapping into the pipeline to siphon off a bucket or 12 of famed Brugse Bok is apparently “the talk of the town,” according to the BBC. The brewery’s onto any schemers already, though, alas, warning wily townspeople that “if there’s any leak or tapping, we’ll be able to detect it anyway.”

[Telegraph UK, Consumerist]

A Belgian Town Is Building an Underground Beer Pipeline — What Could Go