My Favorite New Pipeline Transports Beer, Not Oil

The beautiful of city of Bruges, Belgium now
has a beer pipeline.  

Pipelines have been controversial and in the news lately.

There's the standoff in North Dakota over the oil pipeline there, and here in Vermont, they're still fighting about a natural gas pipeline into Addison County.

In Belgium, though, one pipeline is causing no concern, but celebration. That's because it's transporting not oil, but beer.

According to The Guardian, a two mile pipeline is starting operations from De Halve Maan (Half Moon) brewery in the middle of Bruges, Belgium, to a bottling plant just outside the city. The pipeline has the capacity to fill 12,000 bottles of beer per hour.

Xavier Vanneste, director and heir to De Halve Maan, said he saw workers laying broadband cables outside his house, and had a flash of inspiration.

His brewery is in the middle of the old city of Bruges, and because of the lack of space in town, the bottling plant is a couple miles away. That meant he had to truck beer to the bottling plant - expensive for him and annoying to the city because of all those trucks.

This schematic aerial photo shows the path of the
beer pipeline from the center of Bruges, Belgium to a
a bottling plant out by the expressway.

De Halve Maan could have just moved the brewery out to where the bottling plant is, but that would mean he could no longer say De Halve Maan was brewed in the historic beer city of Bruges.

Vanneste wanted to preserve the brewery tradition of the city, which dates back at least to the mid 1500s.

Vanneste hired tunneling experts from the oil and gas industry and Belgium's top professor in malting and brewing to plan and construct the pipeline, according to The Guardian.

By the way, you can buy Half Moon beer in the United States, so if you want to support the company that came up with this great idea, I'd say go for it.

Of course, a lot of people would like to have a beer pipeline going by their house. Although it wouldn't happen in this case, wouldn't be cool if the beer pipeline was like a municipal water line?

You could tap into the beer pipe and have very good beer running out of your faucets in the kitchen.

Any local entrepreneurs want to try that idea?