3 km beer pipeline for Brugge

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Feldon

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Story from SBS News (http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/09/24/beer-pipeline-carry-booze-under-bruges) ex AFP.


Beer pipeline to carry booze under Bruges
Brugge.jpg
A pipeline to transfer beer from a five century old brewery in Belgium to a nearby bottling factory will take 85 per cent of Bruge's trucks off the roads.

Tired of delivery trucks rumbling near its mythic canals, Belgium's medieval town of Bruges has approved the construction of a beer pipeline to link a five-century-old brewery to a bottling factory nearby.

The three-kilometre (two-mile) underground pipeline will link the De Halve Maan brewery in the heart of the "Venice of the North" to an industrial park where the beer will be bottled and shipped to thirsty drinkers worldwide, the company's director Xavier Vanneste told AFP on Tuesday.

"The idea is born of environmental and quality of life concerns, and not economic ones," he said.

Once fully approved and constructed, the pipeline will keep 500 trucks out of the city's cobblestoned alleys every year, about 85 percent of the town's lorry traffic.

Beer has been brewed on the site for nearly five centuries and 100,000 tourists visit the premises every year, a major stop on tours of the town, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

"We always wanted to keep the beer brewed at the historic site," even after the bottling was moved out of town in 2010, said local official Franky Demon.

But to avoid harming the city's gothic facades and medieval belfry, pipeline construction will use some of the latest technologies perfected for the transport of oil and gas.

The brewery will pay for the pipeline, Belgium's first, though Vanneste was unable to estimate the cost at this stage.

Construction is expected to begin next year.


Must make for one hell of a CIP process.

(and does anybody know anything about the curly tube on the beer tap?)
 
Curly tap is a pigtail sample valve... Adds resistance and therefore cuts down on foaming when taking a sample from a pressurised tank - same way that line length on a keg setup does.
 
Going to be a lot of pissed council workers when they forget to call dial before you dig :)
Cheers....spog..
 
Feldon said:
Must make for one hell of a CIP process.
With a line of that length they'd probably have to pig it :drinks:
 
500 trucks equal 85% of the truck traffic in Bruges? only 75 other trucks in a whole year? all his effort to get rid of 1.5 trucks a day which apparently damage the town so badly?

sounds like either someone got their numbers wrong or like a hoax (remember beer of the water tap in Perth?).
 
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