theguardian.com – It had long been the stuff of bar-stool fantasies: a beer pipeline that could funnel the staple drink of Belgium beneath the cobbled streets and gothic houses of Bruges.

“Everyone always thought, ‘it’s a dream, it’s a joke, it is something that is not realisable at all,’” said Xavier Vanneste, director and heir to De Halve Maan, Bruges’s only continuously working old brewery.

Now, though, the dream is about to become reality: Belgium’s first major beer pipeline will start pumping beneath Bruges from September.