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Beer, the golden beverage (or dark and smoky, red, brownish, or honey-light beverage) that is loved the world over has seen a huge uptick in popularity in the last few years. Now, it seems as if the craft beer boom, combined with the fact that beer is delicious with just about any meal, has led to the impractical shipping of beer through Belgium (and possibly the rest of the world). Trucks are simply too slow, too expensive and aren’t doing the job needed to keep up with the Belgian demand for the golden nectar of the gods. So, they did whatever any innovative people would do — build a pipeline that sends 1,000 gallons of beer an hour under the streets of Bruges.
Xavier Vanneste, the director of De Halve Maan brewery, explained the need for the pipeline to the New York Times.
“We wanted to avoid running big expensive tanker trucks back and forth transporting our beer. So we constructed a direct pipeline from the brewery to the bottle room.”
The pipeline sends the beer from its 500-year-old historical brewery to its bottling facilities on the edge of town, and the $4.5 million project was funded by 500 donors, who will have free beer for life. It’s a win-win. The streets are less congested, and the beer is flowing freely in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
Of course, with any pipeline, questions have to be raised. What happens if the pipe cracks? It would be a horrifying nightmare. Golden waves would flood the tightly-packed streets of Bruges. Something like this has happened before, and it’s deadly.
But, the risk is worth the reward. And there are worse ways to go than drowning in beer. Like drowning in mead.
(Via The New York Times)
