“As far as we know, this is the first time ever that such a thing has been done”, Xavier Vanneste, the director of De Halve Maan, or The Half Moon, a brewery, said in an interview. From Friday, thousands of litres beer will be pumped beneath the cobbled streets of the medieval Belgium city, which is a UNESCO-protected site.
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The pipeline means the brewery can stay in its current location within the town center, where it has been brewing for the past 500 years. Those backers will receive a lifetime supply of free beer from De Halve Maan as a reward – proportional to their donations, according to the report. All in all, it costs $4.5 million to build, with about $335,000 crowdfunded from online beer lovers. The brewery faced some red tape, but it finally got the city’s approval, and the pipeline was buried under the streets of Bruges. The Managing Director of the Halve Maan brewery told reporters that initially the plan was considered to be a insane fantasy, even by all of them but when the saw local worker working underground, laying cables, they started getting interested.
The pipeline is 3,276 meters (2 miles) long, and runs 34 meters (111 feet) below the surface at its deepest point.
The pipeline will be capable of pumping 880 gallons of peer per hour to the bottling plant.
It is equipped with the latest technology to ensure the quality of the beer is maintained throughout its journey. Between batches, the pipes will be sterilized with jets of cleaning solution.
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The pipeline also goes under an historic canal.
