The turn of a tap on Friday propelled Bruges, a medieval
Belgian city, into the future — and sent its citizens to the bar — as
dignitaries and drinkers celebrated a momentous innovation: the world’s first
beer pipeline.
The two-mile pipeline, visible in one spot through a
transparent manhole cover cut into the cobblestone, carries beer from one of
the country’s oldest still-operating breweries in the center of Bruges to a
bottling plant on its outskirts.
The project
cost about 4 million euros, or $4.5 million. But the brewery discovered an
innovative way to raise the funds: promise donors free beer for life.
“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. “It’s an old product, but an
innovative project.”
Bruges, a medieval city and a Unesco World Heritage site, is
visited by 2 million tourists annually. The influx of visitors made
transporting the brew daily on tanker trucks expensive, and risked forcing the
500-year-old brewery out of its home.
The last truck visited the brewery on Thursday. By Friday,
over 1,000 gallons, or 12,000 bottles of beer, began flowing through the
pipeline per hour. The brewery plans to operate the pipeline 24 hours a day.
Mr. Vanneste said the idea was rooted in the city’s existing
infrastructure.
“We got the idea from looking at other life provisions that
run through pipes,” he said. “Water pipes, electricity pipes, cable
distribution, etc. So why wouldn’t that be possible for beer?”
One potential obstacle was that the city had never
previously permitted a private company to run its own pipes beneath the
streets. Another was cost.
The mayor of Bruges, Renaat Landuyt, though initially
skeptical, warmed to the idea and approved the brewery’s plan.
Funding, however, was a different matter.
So Mr. Vanneste turned to another innovation his ancestors,
who began operating the brewery in 1856, could never have dreamed of: the
internet.
More than 500 people contributed to an online crowdsourcing
campaign that helped raise the money needed to lay the pipe.
Backers are to be rewarded “with free beer for life in
proportion to their contribution,” Mr. Vanneste said. “For example, someone
that only made a small investment will get maybe a pack of beer every year on
his birthday. But someone who paid the maximum amount may receive up to one
bottle of beer a day for the rest of his or her life.”
