The folks over at De Halve Maan are setting up a pipeline to shift all the frothy beer from their old factory to new factory for filtration, bottling and shipping - via an underground beer pipeline! Now, the beer will flow through a 2.8 km polyethylene pipeline, making the trip in 15 to 20 minutes.

"This innovative investment plan would reduce the amount of transport by heavy goods vehicles by 85 percent," Franky Dumon from the city council said. And it's a lot of heavy goods - the brewery will be moving 6,000 litres of beer every hour from the pipeline, instead of deploying heavy delivery trucks to rumble near its canals.

The two-mile underground pipeline will link the De Halve Maan brewery in the heart of the "Venice of the North" to an industrial park where the beer will be bottled and shipped to drinkers worldwide, company director Xavier Vanneste said.

"The idea is born of environmental and quality of life concerns, and not economic ones," he said. Once fully approved and constructed, the pipeline will keep 500 trucks out of the city's cobblestoned alleys every year, about 85pc of the town's lorry traffic.

Beer has been brewed on the site for nearly five centuries and 100,000 tourists visit the premises every year, a major stop on tours of the town, a UNESCO World Heritage site.