Underground beer pipeline to run through Belgian town

Belgian authorities are constructing a full two-mile (3.2 km) pipeline exclusively for beer under the streets of the city of Bruges, a media report said.

According to officials, the pipeline, which is expected to be completed later this year, will pump beer at a speed of 4,000 litres an hour from De Halve Maan Brewery in the centre of Bruges to its bottling plant outside the city, CNN reported on Sunday.

"I think we are the very first ones to do this," says Xavier Vanneste, whose family has run the brewery for 160 years.

There has been a lot of support around town for the project, Vanneste said.

"We received a lot of people spontaneously offering us to pass alongside their house," he said, adding: "They just had one condition -- they wanted a tap-in point."

However, the pipeline is not being built so that people could have personal beer taps inside their homes, instead it is for solving a logistical problem, the authorities said.

In 2010, the brewery moved its bottling plant outside of the city.

Being an older place with small, cobblestone streets, it was hard for tankers to get into Bruges to pick up beer and deliver it to the bottling plant, they said.

After this, Vanneste came up with the idea for the pipeline and started a crowdfunding campaign to help pay for the estimated $4.5 million pipeline offering beer rewards.

One of the top donors is restaurateur Philippe Le Loup, who has donated $11,000. He now gets free beer for life.

--IANS

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