An Underground Beer Pipeline…Coming to a City Near You?

In the years since the De Halve Mann brewery first opened a bottling facility outside of Bruges in 2010, the company has faced unusual logistics problems. It still brews its beer at the original site downtown (as it has for nearly five centuries). To get all of their beer to their new factory for filtration, bottling and shipping, it’s historically used trucks–trucks that use fuel, release carbon and clog the city’s streets–things that are not exactly environmentally conscious. 

They recently decided they’ve had enough. Their city council has approved the brewery’s unusual but clever plan to save time and money while reducing emissions and congestion at the same time. It will build an underground pipeline to transport the brew across town.  Yep–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.

It turns out that Great Lakes Brewing Company currently uses underground tubes to move beer between its brewery and its pub across the street today, so this underground concept isn’t completely novel. But this beer journey in Brugge is much longer and stands to have a much bigger and long term impact for reducing traffic and carbon emissions–a move that may begin drawing interest from more breweries here domestically in the U.S. 

We can’t help but beg the question…will there come a day when beer can be pipelined from your favorite Indiana brewery directly into your own home?  Maybe we’re wishful thinking here but then again, it would solve that problem of those pesky and inconvenient growler-fill trips.