I toured the brewery last month and they talked about the pipeline. They ferment in Bruges on site, and then the beer goes to the filtering and bottling facility which is outside of the city center. They want to maintain that they are Bruges beer. Its a very small facility to have worldwide distro. It was a great little brewery tour with a cute and knowledgable english speaking tour guide from Alaska.
They are over a century behind the US: 1888 - A BEER PIPELINE - and this one was going to run from the brewery to individuals' apartments, not the brewery's bottling plant. Lots of pre-Pro-built breweries had pipelines (usually over-head) that crossed public roads from their cellars to their bottling plant. Forget the particulars, but in the era before the Feds would tax the beer as it was coming out of the cellar to the bottling plant, kegs had to have a tax stamp applied to them, the keg then had to legally cross a public road and only then could the beer be bottled - either by the brewery or an independent bottler.
Im not that impressed. Call me the day a pipeline from NY fueled with Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout make it to the old world. By the way, yes Kidden is right... Theres a saying in french which roughly translate to "Whats new is what we have forgotten" and this goes for history, politics or beer.
There is a 5km pipeline sending beer all over in a soccer stadium in Germany. It's for FC Schalke. It's not the same as in the article but it is still cool. They can store 52,000 liters in the lower levels of the stadium and the pipelines deliver beer to bars, restaurants, counters, etc all over the stadium. It sounds pretty sweet to me.
Would it just be a long draw draught system on steroids? How much CO2/Nitrogen would it take to push something like this? And how the hell would they clean it? So many questions, I'm mindblown.
They will clean it by sending water through it. If I recall correctly there will be 5 smaller pipelines in which there will be constantly beer or water.
Years ago (still today) it was safer to drink beer than it was to drink water. Until a beer pipeline runs from CCB to my house I'm not impressed.
I am waiting for the 1st beer lover to attempt to tap the line and run one over to their house, LOL. I bet someone attempts to do this....
For those who thought De Halve Mann's beer pipeline was a cool story, we covered it in the magazine back in 2014.
