Bruges Will Cut Traffic With…an Underground Beer Pipeline

[ashling]

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.

http://www.wired.com/2014/09/underground-beer-pipeline/

[pinboy3niner]

1. Beware of beer lovers doing midnight excavations

[ashling]

2. We need to get one for the Lounge

PB39, get right on it!

[pinboy3niner]

4. With all the beer pirates in the Lounge?

Those rogues would have a beer pipeline tapped 10 ways from Sunday as soon as it starts to flow.

[OriginalGeek]

6. I almost feel bad for them

Imagining them there with all the muckity mucks and the ribbon ceremony to celebrate the turning on of the tap and they go up to turn it on and one sad little drop comes ploinking out.

But they can hear drunken laughing coming through the pipes....

[OriginalGeek]

5. lol, absolutely the very first thing I thought

was gotta find my shovel and head lamp hat.

and a bucket. Gonna need a bucket.

[NightWatcher]

3. I need my passport, drill, and silly straw

Damn I love Bruges

[pinboy3niner]

7. If they're going to do this, I suspect they'll have special security for the pipeline

Personally, I'd go with fricken laser sharks.

[NightWatcher]

8. Then I need to apply for a job with their security company

"no problems here boys, (hiccup) my section of pipeline is secure"

[NV Whino]

9. I have an idea for the next heist movie!

[pinboy3niner]

10. I fermently agree!

[NV Whino]

11. The idea has been brewing for some time.

[ashling]

15. Better hops right on it

[betsuni]

12. I guess there are no earthquakes there.

Shaking up a pipe full of suds ... imagine the foam.

[pinboy3niner]

13. ...

"Oh, the brewmanity!"

[Taitertots]

14. Cut the water to my house, connect me into the beer pipeline

De Halve Man is delicious.

[Tom Kitten]

16. This actually was a premise on the old Untouchables TV show.

Eliot Ness has been cracking down even harder on the delivery of booze to Frank Nitti's speakeasys, so Telly Savalas comes up with a plan to outwit the Feds - a beer pipeline through the city sewers. It works, too, until they get caught. Naturally!