Here’s How You Build a Beer Pipeline Across a Medieval City

Bruges Belgium Getty Images

Bruges-based De Halve Maan brewery is building an underground pipeline to move beer from its brewery in the city center to its bottling facility a few miles away. It makes a lot of sense practically speaking, but let’s be honest: Most people are probably concerned with how they can sneakily drill into the ground and siphon off some brew for themselves. But before their plans can go horribly awry, De Halve Maan has to build the thing. And it’s going to be a lot harder than digging a trench, laying some pipe, and turning on the spigot. That’s because this is no ordinary construction area: Bruges’ entire city center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it’s covered in medieval architecture.

De Halve Maan has been brewing in Bruges since the 1850s, and in 2010 opened a new bottling facility just outside the city center to accommodate growth. That created a logistical problem: To move four million liters of beer from the old site to the new each year, De Halve Maan used trucks, which burned fuel and clogged Bruges’ small, cobblestone streets.

Two years ago, the brewery started looking for a new way to make the trip, and someone suggested a pipeline under the city. It “seemed to be a kind of joke” at first, says owner and Managing Director Xavier Vanneste. But upon considering the idea more seriously, “we realized it was not so crazy after all.”

De Halve Maan brewing vats. De Halve Maan

This isn’t the world’s first beer pipeline: According to City Labs, Cleveland’s Great Lakes Brewing Company uses underground tubes to move beer across the street, from its brewery to its pub. But there’s a difference between tunneling under a Cleveland street and digging up a medieval city.

Vanneste and his team started by looking at the oil and gas industries, where pipelines are commonplace, to see if it was technically feasible. They discussed the idea with beer experts, to make sure shipping their good stuff underground wouldn’t ruin the flavor. (The only consideration is that too much pressure can affect flavor, so they won’t be pumping too fast.) Then, they turned to the local authorities, to start the process. That’s where things started to get tricky: Bruges has its heritage site status thanks medieval buildings that testify “to significant stages in the commercial and cultural development of medieval Europe.” And what does UNESCO list as one of the biggest threats to preservation? New construction.

Bruges, a few miles inland from the English Channel in northwest Belgium, has been inhabited since at least the Iron Age. The city was founded by Vikings in the ninth century, and really got going between 1200 and 1400, when it was “the economic capital of Europe north of the Alps,” according to UNESCO. In the following centuries, it was home to some of the great painters of the Flemish Primitive movement. It’s where the first books were printed in English and French. Many of the buildings constructed during its “golden age,” from the late 14th to early 16th century, still stand today, and the city is lauded for its influence on the development of architecture. Colin Farrell filmed In Bruges in Bruges. (It also has great beers and waffles to offer for those less intrigued by history.)

A resting horse feeds in the medieval old town of Bruges Belgium. Getty Images

All of that makes it a tricky place to dig up the ground to lay a beer pipeline. Town officials liked the idea, says Vanneste, but were quite “difficult on the idea of breaking up all the roads,” the risk of damaging historic sites, and increasing congestion with construction. They did approve the pipeline, which is expected to cut heavy truck use by 85 percent, in September. “It is a win-win situation for everyone,” says Franky Dumon, the alderman for spatial planning who approved the project on behalf of the city council. It helped that De Halve Maan has pledged to cover all associated costs, though Vanneste would not provide an estimated budget.

The pipeline will likely consist of four polyurethane tubes, each about four inches in diameter, since the brewery will be moving different types of beer, and sometimes water. Between batches of beer, it will wash out the pipes with a “clean-in-place” process that disinfects and sterilizes everything when necessary.)