Beer-loving Belgians dove deep into their pockets and deep under the cobblestone streets of the historical city of Bruges to create world's first beer pipeline.
Instead of hundreds of trucks crowding the city's cobblestone streets to transport beer from the old brewery to a new bottling plant, the brewery director decided a pipeline would be a better option. It took four years to build the 2 mile long pipeline.
Starting this fall, it will pump some 880 gallons of beer an hour from a brewery to a bottling plant.
It cost four-and-a-half-million dollars to build, but about ten percent of that was financed through crowd funding.
Xavier Vanneste is the De Halve Maan Brewery Director who came up with the plan. He says the idea was born from conversations with the property owners along the route.
"Actually lots of people were asking us for tapping points or making jokes about it, were saying 'look you can't pass along our streets or along side our building or door. But we are willing to invest as long as we can have a little tapping point of the pipeline'. So that gave us the idea actually to crowd fund the project," says Vanneste.
At the top level, 21 people paid over $8000 each in exchange for one bottle of beer every day for the rest of their life.
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