In a bid to stop the city's roads being clogged up with beer lorries, Bruges is to re-route its beer underground, through 3km of pipeline capable of carrying 6,000 litres per hour. 
 
 In addition to being a Willy Wonkian approach to beer transport and enabling the use of the quite wonderful measurement of litres per hour with regards to beer, the system will allow for around 500 tankers to be taken off the road. 
 
 Inevitably there are some fears that people will try to tap off the pipeline, but its creators are confident the beer will be secure. 
 
 Belgian beer being poured (Picture: Getty) 
 
 "This is stronger than a steel pipe. It’s really very strong. So we are quite confident that no leaks or illegal tapping points will be there," brewery owner Xavier Vanneste told EuroNews. 
 
 The pipe will stretch from De Halve Maan brewery to a bottling plant 4km away, with beer travelling at about 15 to 20km/h and reaching the plant in as little as 10 minutes. 
 
 There are many beers named after Bruges, though the only breweries remaining along with De Halve Maan are Brugse Zot and Brugse Straffe Hendrik. 
 
 Construction on the pipeline will begin later this year. ||||| The tiny town of Wacken in Schleswig-Holstein is already prepping for its annual heavy metal fest in August, which will see its current population of about 1,800 people balloon to more than 75,000. 
 
 In anticipation of all the beer to be drunk, the fest is building its first ever beer pipeline to transport the average 400,000 litres of brew consumed each year to the concert grounds. And the pipeline system will be speedy enough for bartenders to draw six beers per second. 
 
 “With this, the grounds will not to have need to have any heavy trucks distributing beer barrels,” said Wacken fest founder Holger Hübner on Tuesday. 
 
 The new pipeline is being built above all because it “is sustainable and it protects the ground” from aforementioned trucks with barrels, says spokeswoman Frederike Arns. 
 
 Each previous year, festival workers had to constantly move dozens of barrels through the grounds, bringing in full ones before and during the shows, and then removing empty ones.This caused a lot of wear and tear to the ground. The pipeline will reduce this traffic, and also eliminate the wait at the bar for a new keg to be tapped. 
 
 Along with the beer supply, the power and fiber optics will also get their own pipelines, as will drinking water and sewage - a fact which means it will be especially important that the lines don’t get crossed, the Hamburger Morgenpost notes. 
 
 “Of course we will control the hygiene of the tubes all the time,” the festival wrote in a statement. 
 
 Heavy rain during the festival can cause huge puddles to form - often to the delight of concert-goers. The improved drainage system will prevent this from happening. 
 
 “But no one should be afraid that there will be no more mud,” says Hübner. 
 
 The estimated total investment in the improvements is €1 million. 
 
 Metal fans from around the world will be able to enjoy the innovative amenities as they mosh to the music of 150 bands, including headliners Alice Cooper, Megadeath and Marilyn Manson. 
 
 According to Hamburg research group Statista, metal fans each drank on average 5.1 litres of beer in 2011. At Nürburg’s Rock am Ring rock festival, fans drank 3.1 litres each. 
 
 But while Wacken visitors may drink a lot, police and emergency workers emphasize that the open air fest is “mostly rollicking and peaceful”. ||||| German brewers called on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government to block the tapping of shale gas by means of hydraulic fracturing, citing industry concerns that fracking could taint the purity of the country’s beer. 
 
 The Association of German Breweries, which represents companies including Anheuser-Busch InBev NV (ABI) and Bitburger Braugruppe GmbH, rejected the government’s planned legislation on fracking until groundwater contamination can be safely excluded. They said the current proposals are inadequate to protect drinking water and hence risk infringing the country’s 500-year-old law on beer purity. 
 
 “We are concerned that fracking endangers the brewing water that more than half of Germany’s breweries take from private wells,” Marc-Oliver Huhnholz, a spokesman for the group, said today by phone from Berlin. “And that it threatens our absolutely pure beer.” The association has sent a letter voicing its concerns to six Cabinet ministers including Environment Minister Peter Altmaier, he said, confirming a report in Bild newspaper today. 
 
 Fracking, which is already politically and environmentally contentious in Germany as federal elections loom on Sept. 22, has attracted a powerful opponent in the country’s brewers, which together employ more than 25,000 people in an industry with sales of about 8 billion euros ($10 billion) last year. 
 
 Campaign Beer 
 
 Merkel, who drank from a one liter traditional beer mug during a campaign rally in Munich this month, has agreed on draft legislation in her coalition that would outlaw fracking in some areas. It remains unclear whether a law can be passed before the election, Altmaier said yesterday in an interview with German broadcaster ARD. The main opposition Social Democrats are calling for a temporary ban on the practice while their Green party allies want to outlaw it altogether. 
 
 Fracking is an option for all of Europe and should be kept open in Germany, European Union Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said yesterday on ARD. The same day, EU leaders urged faster integration of the bloc’s power and natural-gas markets to lower energy prices as the U.S. shale-gas revolution widens the EU’s cost gap with its largest trading partner. 
 
 Altmaier said decisions on fracking, which involves drilling hundreds of wells and cracking rocks with a high-pressure mixture of water, sand and chemicals to unlock gas or oil from impermeable stone, should be made by national and regional governments. 
 
 “Fracking is not yet a technology that we can use in Germany,” Altmaier told ARD. “I want the related decisions to be made locally, where one knows the circumstances, and not somewhere in Brussels.” 
 
 Purity Law 
 
 While companies such as Chevron Corp. (CVX) have begun drilling exploration wells in countries including Poland, shale-gas production in Europe won’t make the region self-sufficient in natural gas, a 2012 study by the EU Joint Research Centre said. 
 
 Germany’s brewers point to what they say is the oldest food-safety regulation in the world to justify their concerns about fracking. The Reinheitsgebot, or “purity law,” was drafted in April 1516 at the instigation of Duke Wilhelm IV in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt, now the base of Volkswagen AG’s Audi brand. The law states that only malted barley, hops and water may go into beer, with the later addition of yeast, which had not yet been discovered at the time. 
 
 The law, still in existence 497 years later, “guarantees a workable form of consumer protection at a time in which other foodstuffs often make negative headlines,” the Association of German Breweries says on its website. “German beer contains no artificial flavorings and no additives -- only malt, hops, yeast and water.” 
 
 ‘Unreconstructed Classics’ 
 
 The result is what beer critic Michael Jackson said on his “beer hunter” website are some “unreconstructed classics.” 
 
 German beer is enjoyed by a population that is among the thirstiest in Europe. Germany, which with about 82 million inhabitants is Europe’s most populous nation, also consumes the most beer: 89,853 million hectolitres (about 2.4 trillion gallons) in 2011, double the volume consumed in the second-ranked country, the U.K., according figures from The Brewers of Europe industry group posted on the association’s website. 
 
 In terms of individual consumption, Germans drop to third with 107 liters in 2011, edged out by their Austrian neighbors who drank 108 liters that year. Both countries are put to shame by the Czechs, each of whom consumed 154 liters, or more than five times the French. 
 
 To contact the reporter on this story: Stefan Nicola in Berlin at snicola2@bloomberg.net 
 
 To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.net
– Forget Keystone, here's a pipeline we can all get behind. A series of underground tubes will transport beer from the De Halve Maan brewery at the center of Bruges, Belgium, to a bottling plant a couple miles away. "It all started as a joke," brewer Xavier Vanneste tells the Wall Street Journal. But, four years after work began, the pipeline is just weeks away from completion. The project was "born of environmental and quality of life concerns," Vanneste told AFP in an earlier story. Beer has been brewed at De Halve Maan's historic site for some five centuries. The bottling end of the operation was moved to an industrial area in 2010, creating traffic issues. The pipeline will eliminate some 500 truck trips through the city's narrow, cobblestone alleyways each year. Unfortunately, rumors notwithstanding, in-home taps aren't an option for locals. Once complete, the pipeline (a "Willy Wonkian approach" to the traffic problem, per the Independent) will transport 1,500 gallons of beer per hour at 12mph. The $4.5 million project was, in part, crowdfunded, with donors receiving lifetime supplies of beer (one 11 ounce bottle per day or one 25 ounce bottle per year, depending on the donation amount). A local restaurateur who contributed calculated that he would regain his investment, via beer, in 15 years. But, he tells the Journal, he would have preferred a direct tap to his establishment: "It would have saved me a lot of keg-dragging.” The mayor of Bruges is now considering pipelines to transport all kinds of things, including chocolate. As for concerns that scofflaws may try to illegally tap the beer line, which is buried at depths of six to 100 feet, Vanneste says the polyethylene tubes are stronger than steel. But, the brewer promises, the flavor of its beers will be unaffected. (Bieber's beer bong encounter ended badly.)