Beer Pipeline - What a Concept!

Well, hello there. Heard the woosh; looked over and you already had your mug poised under the spigot. Good to see you! Thanks for dropping by. Help yourself to a virtual muffin or doughnut while you're over there. Say, Belgium has come up with a unique way to cut down on trucks (lorries) in the city of Bruges.

A 3km (1.86 mile) beer pipeline is to be installed under the medieval city of Bruges, to cut the number of lorries on its streets. It will link the De Halve Maan brewery to a bottling plant. Here is a taste of the journey

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.

Instead of making the 3-mile drive in one of dozens of tankers that traverse town each day, the award-winning beer will flow through a 1.8-mile polyethylene pipeline, making the trip in 15 to 20 minutes. The pipeline will move 6,000 liters of beer every hour, De Halve Man CEO Xavier Vanneste told Het Nieuwsblad. 
The residents of Bruges will be happy to get all those trucks off the street, but we assume they’re at least kind of hoping for a burst pipe and streets filled with free beer. 

While they're at it, why not connect up all the pubs along the way? Next project could be an inter-city pipeline...hold on a minute...why not to all members of the EU?

"A pint of your best, please, Innkeeper!"

See ya, eh!

Bob

PS: Great film that...In Bruges, I think it was called...or just Bruges. Very dark plot.