Beer is great, but traffic from beer shipment trucks - not so much.
That's why a Belgian medieval city called Bruges is getting ready to build a beer pipeline beneath the cobble stone streets connecting a local brewery to a bottling factory.
"The idea is born of environmental and quality of life concerns, and not economic ones," Xavier Vanneste, director of the De Halve Maan brewery, tells Fox News. He adds it "will keep hundreds of lorries [trucks] out of the city center."
The construction will begin next year on the pipeline designed to carry over 1,500 gallons of beer an hour.
De Halve Maan began brewing beer in Bruges in 1856. The brewery's beer is popular and in high demand, which means more trucks are needed to transport the beer from the brewery to the bottle maker.
Though centuries have passed since the brewery opened, the city of Bruges remains a quaint, medieval city that is not open to heavy traffic from commerical trucks.
"We thought, 'it's a crazy idea to do this,'" Vanneste tells NPR. "But you start thinking about it, and you start investigating and talking to other engineers from other businesses, and suddenly, it's not such a crazy idea after all."
Vanneste says the pipelines were tested to make sure they wouldn't affect the quality, taste, foam or color of the beer. The pipes will also be cleaned between batches to avoid contamination, he explains to NPR.
Gelsenkirchen, Germany is the only other city in the world that possesses a beer pipeline.
