Halve Maan Brewery Beer Pipeline – Bruges, Belgium - Gastro Obscura

Halve Maan Brewery Beer Pipeline

A beer pipeline runs beneath Bruges. 

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Running underneath the city streets of the medieval city of Bruges is a contemporary innovation: a pipeline for beer. The tube transports 1,000 gallons of beer per hour—the equivalent of 12,000 bottles—from one of the country’s oldest still-operational breweries, Halve Maan (“half moon”), to its bottling plant two miles away. 

Brouwerij De Halve Maan opened in Bruges in 1856. A century and a half later, in 2016, a crowdsourcing campaign was launched to raise funds for the beer pipeline. The 500+ donors received a priceless thank you gift: free beer for life. Today, visitors can glimpse a section of the pipeline through a transparent manhole cover cut into the cobblestone street.

There are other, older beer pipelines that set the precedent for this one in Bruges. In 1930, a 6,000-foot-long hose was discovered under the streets of Yonkers, New York, which is believed to have been a conduit for beer during Prohibition. There are also underground pipes between the breweries in Munich and Theresienwiese, where the Oktoberfest takes place.

Know Before You Go

Please note that you cannot see the pipeline (it is buried under ground). The address given below is the one of the brewery in Bruges.Type in Google or Apple Maps: 51.202355, 3.224116.

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