constructeur maison moderne belgique

this is bruges, in belgium, famous for chocolate, lace and beer. and this is the half moon brewery. there's been a brewery on this site for somewherearound five centuries. there used to be 30 in the city, but modernproduction and making enough beer to meet the exportdemands of the world make that difficult. the half moon brewery moved their bottlingoperation outside the city years ago, about two miles, but brewing stayed here.

this was the last brewery in bruges. there have been new brewers coming along withnew ideas recently, so now we are not the only one any more, but we're definitely the oldest one. who are we to change the location of thisbrewery? logistics are tricky when your entire citycentre is a world heritage site. getting ingredients in was tough enough, but having to also bring tanker trucks throughnarrow cobbled streets, fill them up with beer and then drive themout to the bottling plant two miles away,

well, they needed a better solution. so they built one. the beer gets into the pipe right from thebrewing room, which is here, and goes from one tank here in the city centreof bruges to another tank on the other side in the bottlingplant. the pipeline's about this size, that's theouter diameter, and inside that one you have four pipes whichare approximately 8cm diameter. the beer goes through at the rate of about5,000-6,000l/hr. it's not such a high flow rate that it's underpressure, it's relatively slow.

so it takes a batch of beer about a smallhour to get to the other side. the beer enters our site here, it goes inone of the big tanks, the lagering process goes on for three weeks, then the beer has to be filtered, pasteurised,we add sugar and yeast, then everything goes into the bottle. yeast inside the bottle has to do the secondfermentation, and that's happening in a warm room. after the transport, we clean our pipes withcleaning products, we put disinfection inside of the pipe,

then we flush it with around 300 litresof water before we put beer into the pipeline again. outside the city centre, along highways, sure, regular excavators were fine. but here, some more creative approaches wereneeded. getting permission for this project wasn'teasy, but we were lucky to have some forward-thinkingpeople in our city that agreed with this idea and gave us thepermit. it runs only under public domain, so onlyunder the streets,

not under houses or private properties, and they actually drill from a distance, so they make a hole on every corner of thestreet, and then they have a guided drilling wherebythey don't need to open up all the streets in order to drill. four months of construction isn't normallya project that's welcomed, but the locals of bruges seemed to think thatthis was something special. the locals initially thought it was a joke,i think. people really took to the idea and actuallyjoked a lot about

tapping off the pipeline and getting beerin their own home or kitchen. it wouldn't be possible to connect a pub oreven a house along the pipeline, however, that's why we invented the crowdfunding, that's where the idea came from, so people could crowdfund to actually getsome beer for life, which was the replacement of having a littlebeer tap in their own house! thank you to everyone at the half moon breweryin bruges. pull down the description for more about them!