The Bar Towel

Posted: **Fri Sep 26, 2014 2:02 pm**

In the years since the De Halve Maan brewery opened a bottling facility outside Bruges in 2010, the company’s faced a tricky logistics problem. It still brews beer at its original site downtown, just as it has for nearly five centuries. To get all that delicious beer to the new factory for filtration, bottling, and shipping, it uses trucks. Trucks that burn fuel, spew carbon and clog the city’s cobblestone streets (which surely froths all that beer).

No more. The city council has approved the brewery’s unusual but clever plan to save time and money while reducing emissions and congestion. It will build a pipeline to ferry the good stuff across town, underground. Yes, you read that right: A beer pipeline.

Posted: **Sat Sep 27, 2014 10:56 am**

For years the wife and I fantasized about building one from the Granite around the corner to our place. After several engineering studies, we settled on homebrewing.

I wonder how the folks in Bruges feel about this. Are they anxiously awaiting a rupture?

Posted: **Sun Sep 28, 2014 12:12 am**

It's not an entirely new concept. I'm relatively sure the Carlsberg brewery had one.

Posted: **Mon Sep 29, 2014 10:33 am**

Reminds me of a story at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire (one of UK's biggest stately homes). There was an onsite brewery with beer piped into the house. But the gardening staff creatively inserted a branch pipe upstream of the house for their own private use!
http://www.chatsworth.org/attractions-a ... beer-casks

Posted: **Mon Sep 29, 2014 10:40 am**

I think it was Swans or Spinnakers in Victoria that ran beer lines under the road between their brew house and pub

Posted: **Tue Sep 30, 2014 1:56 pm**

Interesting...I was just at the Great Lakes brewery in Cleveland, where they have underground pipes going across the road. It's a very short distance there though.

The Bar Towel

Underground Beer Pipeline

Underground Beer Pipeline