This is Bruges, in Belgium,
famous for chocolate, lace and beer.
And this is the Half Moon Brewery.
There's been a brewery on this site for somewhere around five centuries.
There used to be 30 in the city, but modern production
and making enough beer to meet the export demands of the world
make that difficult.
The Half Moon Brewery moved their bottling operation outside the city years ago,
about two miles, but brewing stayed here.
This was the last brewery in Bruges.
There have been new brewers coming along with new ideas recently,
so now we are not the only one any more,
but we're definitely the oldest one.
Who are we to change the location of this brewery?
Logistics are tricky when your entire city centre is a World Heritage Site.
Getting ingredients in was tough enough,
but having to also bring tanker trucks through narrow cobbled streets,
fill them up with beer and then drive them out to the bottling plant two miles away,
well, they needed a better solution.
So they built one.
The beer gets into the pipe right from the brewing room, which is here,
and goes from one tank here in the city centre of Bruges
to another tank on the other side in the bottling plant.
The pipeline's about this size, that's the outer diameter,
and inside that one you have four pipes which are approximately 8cm diameter.
The beer goes through at the rate of about 5,000-6,000l/hr.
It's not such a high flow rate that it's under pressure, it's relatively slow.
So it takes a batch of beer about a small hour to get to the other side.
The beer enters our site here, it goes in one of the big tanks,
the lagering process goes on for three weeks,
then the beer has to be filtered, pasteurised, we add sugar and yeast,
then everything goes into the bottle.
Yeast inside the bottle has to do the second fermentation,
and that's happening in a warm room.
After the transport, we clean our pipes with cleaning products,
we put disinfection inside of the pipe,
then we flush it with around 300 litres of water
before we put beer into the pipeline again.
Outside the city centre, along highways,
sure, regular excavators were fine.
But here, some more creative approaches were needed.
Getting permission for this project wasn't easy,
but we were lucky to have some forward-thinking people in our city
that agreed with this idea and gave us the permit.
It runs only under public domain, so only under the streets,
not under houses or private properties,
and they actually drill from a distance,
so they make a hole on every corner of the street,
and then they have a guided drilling whereby they don't need to open up
all the streets in order to drill.
Four months of construction isn't normally a project that's welcomed,
but the locals of Bruges seemed to think that this was something special.
The locals initially thought it was a joke, I think.
People really took to the idea and actually joked a lot about
tapping off the pipeline and getting beer in their own home or kitchen.
It wouldn't be possible to connect a pub or even a house along the pipeline,
however, that's why we invented the crowdfunding,
that's where the idea came from,
so people could crowdfund to actually get some beer for life,
which was the replacement of having a little beer tap in their own house!
Thank you to everyone at the Half Moon Brewery in Bruges.
Pull down the description for more about them!