Add Belgium To Your Eurotrip ‘Cause It Now Has A Bloody Beer Pipeline

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Published

September 18, 2016

Here is an abridged list of things we know about the Belgian city of Bruges:

It’s a genuinely lovely-lookin’ place, chock-a-block with adorable canals and cobblestone streets;
Those very canals and cobblestones were the focal point of 2008’s criminally under-appreciated Colin Farrell flick In Bruges;
The city now has an honest-to-God beer pipeline holy shit.

YEP. Owing to the fact Bruges’ streets are so old, narrow and tightly-packed, De Halve Maan brewery found trucking that delicious froth across town to the bottling plant to be ridiculously inefficient – so inefficient that the future of the storied institution was in jeopardy.

They concocted a plan: why not just run the beer through three kilometres of pipeline under the UNESCO World Heritage-listed city, instead of wasting time on money on trucks?

Perhaps a nation less keen on beer would have shelved the plan, but not the bloody Belgians, and bless ’em for it. The completed pipeline just started pumping beer on Friday, shifting over 5,000 litres of the stuff per hour.

The project, which cost about AUD $6M, was partially crowdfunded. De Halve Maan director Xavier Vanneste said those who kicked in the most “may receive up to one bottle of beer a day for the rest of his or her life.”

How’s that for an inanimate fucking object?