Try it!

Sunday, June 5, 2016

Hell, we can't even seem to build an oil pipeline anymore, much less a pipeline this heavenly

The Keystone XL pipeline can't get past Emperor Barry's hatred of fossil fuels. So what is keeping the U.S. from having a beer pipeline?
Some men dream of one day owning their own bar or brewery, but Xavier Vanneste already had one — the De Halve Maan, or The Crescent in English.
Unfortunately, achieving one’s dreams often comes with its own obstacles. De Halve Maan sits in the city-center of Bruges, the cobblestone-laden, storybook town in Belgium. As Wired noted, the brewhouse is too small to contain its own bottling plant. And as beautiful as they might be, those small cobblestone streets make transportation a challenge. That might not have been an issue when the brewery opened in 1856, but trucks have a hard time slipping through the city’s narrow corridors to the bottling plant that, in 2010, moved about two miles away. Vanneste was stuck with a frustrating logistical problem.
Then, one morning he looked out his window to see construction workers laying underground cable. It hit him like a barrel-full of hops: build a pipeline.
The sumbitch is doing it, too, using a Kickstarter campaign to fund the project. Fucking brilliant. They overcame a number of logistical and engineering challenges along the way:
The roughly two-mile pipeline sleeps about six feet underground — 100 feet at some places — and is made from high-density polyethylene, a high-grade plastic that Vanneste assured The Post won’t affect the taste of the beer. It was the first thing he tested. The line can pump about 1,056 gallons (4,000 liters) each hour. It’s cleaned by pumping water and cleaning solution through the pipeline between each batch of beer.
The ingenuity of people who really, really want to drink beer always brings a tear to my eye. You go, Xavier Vanneste. You go.



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