Yes, that's why I came to Bruges.

September 16, 2016 11:30 AM

"A beer pipeline has been constructed in the Belgian city of Bruges, to replace the traditional method of transporting beer by tanker." "Four years in planning and five months in construction, the Halve Maan (Half Moon) brewery will officially open a pipe that will rid the historic city center and its tight cobbled lanes of beer-laden trucks weighing more than 40 tonnes."

Belgian brewery's pipe dream brings relief to medieval Bruges

How the numbers flow:

4,000 litres – pumped each hour
Four million euros – the cost
Three kilometres – the total length

How do you transport beer around a beer-loving city when the beer trucks are too large to fit along the medieval streets?

Video: Belgian brewery builds beer pipeline

posted by mandolin conspiracy (32 comments total)

...until Colin Farrell fucks it up somehow.
posted by maryr at 11:39 AM on September 16, 2016 [4 favorites]

Maybe civilization isn't collapsing as quickly as we feared.
posted by Bee'sWing at 11:45 AM on September 16, 2016 [11 favorites]

"My brother and I used to say that drownin' in beer was like heaven, eh? Now he's not here, and I've got two soakers... this isn't heaven. This sucks!"
posted by bondcliff at 11:45 AM on September 16, 2016 [8 favorites]

Hey, I tried some Brugse Zot when I was there. Not bad! I can see how it would be an advantage to pipe it underground, although the first thought that came to mind was shitty bars who never clean the skunk out of the keg lines. I hope they have a good cleaning plan.
posted by Existential Dread at 11:47 AM on September 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

Hmm. Looks like they beat the Chalmers students, who's been working on their beer pipeline since 1959. 100 km is a bit more than 3.2 km, though.
posted by effbot at 11:50 AM on September 16, 2016

YOU'RE AN INANIMATE FUCKING OBJECT!
posted by praemunire at 11:58 AM on September 16, 2016 [15 favorites]

the first thought that came to mind was shitty bars who never clean the skunk out of the keg lines.

I'd hope with piped-in beer the supply on the other end would never blow out like a keg so maybe the beer would always be fresh.
posted by hippybear at 12:05 PM on September 16, 2016

You see- this is what it's like to live in a place that actually invests in INFRASTRUCTURE!
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 12:10 PM on September 16, 2016 [32 favorites]

Presumably they brew more than one kind of beer and so have to change what's in the pipeline occasionally.

I wonder what the mixing profile is of, say, their light and dark biers?

Might require years of testing to find out.
posted by bonehead at 12:16 PM on September 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

Years and years of regular, nightly testing.
posted by hippybear at 12:18 PM on September 16, 2016 [8 favorites]

You have to establish a good baseline. Essential to any good sampling plan.
posted by bonehead at 12:21 PM on September 16, 2016

Now THAT'S a pipeline I can get behind!
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 12:29 PM on September 16, 2016 [9 favorites]

Why be behind such a pipeline when you could be at the front of it, receiving its goods?
posted by hippybear at 12:31 PM on September 16, 2016 [5 favorites]

the first thought that came to mind was shitty bars who never clean the skunk out of the keg lines.

The fact is, ALL beer spends a lot of time in pipes. Ever visit a brewery? Other than large vats, it consists mainly of pipes and hoses - miles of them - all filled with beer.

That's not to say things don't go wrong. Dogfish Head in Delaware sends its beer in a pipeline that stretches a couple hundred yards outdoors to a separate packaging facility. In its first winter of use, the pipeline froze while it was being cleared with a cleaning solution.
posted by sixpack at 12:36 PM on September 16, 2016

"It's a fairytale, innit? How's a fairytale town not somebody's fucking thing? How can all those canals and bridges and cobbled streets and those churches, all that beautiful fucking fairytale stuff, how can that not be somebody's fucking thing, eh?"
posted by briank at 12:38 PM on September 16, 2016 [7 favorites]

Presumably they brew more than one kind of beer and so have to change what's in the pipeline occasionally.

How products in pipelines are kept separate.
posted by Bee'sWing at 12:48 PM on September 16, 2016 [5 favorites]

Is there a Nobel Prize for Awesome?
posted by theora55 at 12:57 PM on September 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

Pigless batching is common too. Batching is typically cheaper and quicker than pigging. Figuring the "interface" length between batches is moderately complicated and requires a lot of empirical testing to get right, especially with new/unsusal fluid types.

So, you know, testing.
posted by bonehead at 1:04 PM on September 16, 2016 [3 favorites]

I would like to volunteer to help dispose of beer that becomes contaminated with other beer where they mix.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 1:20 PM on September 16, 2016 [5 favorites]

I'm imagining this leads to a tap coming out of a wall somewhere and Homer Simpson under it with his mouth open
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 1:35 PM on September 16, 2016 [7 favorites]

They haven't even started looking at the potential opened up by pipelines.

Beer could be delivered like a utility to households, piped through an underground distribution system to refrigerated kegerators, and billed monthly based on volume. Households could subscribe to one or more favored styles.
posted by lathrop at 2:52 PM on September 16, 2016 [6 favorites]

Man, are they going to be buying a lot of caustic. Here's to living in the future.
posted by oneironaut at 3:00 PM on September 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

We would have been world leaders, except Obama cancelled the Keystone Light pipeline.
posted by Dip Flash at 3:41 PM on September 16, 2016 [9 favorites]

We would have been world leaders, except Obama cancelled the Keystone Light pipeline.

The probability of a catastrophic toxic spill with that one was 100%. Leave the Keystone Light in the ground where it belongs.
posted by Special Agent Dale Cooper at 5:06 PM on September 16, 2016 [9 favorites]

Summit Brewing in St. Paul used to have a facility on both sides of the street and they piped the wort across the gap. I have no idea how they dealt with the winter temperatures, however!
posted by wenestvedt at 5:50 PM on September 16, 2016

MetaFilter: piping the wort across the gap
posted by hippybear at 5:59 PM on September 16, 2016

This is almost as cool as Niels Bohr’s personal beer pipeline.
posted by Fongotskilernie at 6:27 PM on September 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

I have no idea how they dealt with the winter temperatures, however!

They probably pipe it while it's still hot. Nature's seasonal chiller.
posted by bradbane at 6:47 PM on September 16, 2016

Back in the 90's when we raided tha defunct Lucky /Falstaff brewery in SF for material to build SRL machines, I found a box of pipe labels that had an arrow and BEER on them.
I kept a bunch of these in the van of the AV company i worked for at the time and would stick them on the overhead pipes in the basements of building in SF when I did deliveries.
posted by boilermonster at 10:28 PM on September 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

MetaFilter: piping the wort across the gap

Ask your doctor about Gardasil.
posted by Sys Rq at 5:34 AM on September 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

This is almost as cool as Niels Bohr’s personal beer pipeline.

The pipeline story seems to have been made up by Forbes, though. The house is real, and he probably had "unlimited" access to beer, but there's no mention of a pipeline in danish sources afaict, and people who know the area says it's unlikely (too far from any brewery building for it to make sense).
posted by effbot at 11:52 AM on September 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

There was a "Untouchables" episode where the mob was building a pipeline to bring Gin into the city I think.
posted by boilermonster at 9:20 AM on September 24, 2016