Brewery De Halve Maan

This is the last family brewery in the centre of Bruges, and in 2016 it did something that had never been done before anywhere in the world: it built an underground beer pipeline. The pipe runs 3,276 metres beneath the cobblestone streets, at its deepest point 34 metres underground, connecting the historic brewery to a bottling plant on the outskirts of town. It can transport 4,000 litres of beer per hour. The pipeline removed roughly 500 tanker truck journeys per year from Bruges' narrow medieval streets, which is the kind of engineering solution a UNESCO World Heritage city deserves.

De Halve Maan has roots dating to 1564, though the current brewery was established in 1856 when Leon Maes — Henri the First, as the family calls him — took ownership. The brewery has remained in family hands ever since. In 1981, Véronique Maes became one of Belgium's first female brewers when she joined her father at the brewery and launched Straffe Hendrik, which remains one of their flagship beers alongside Brugse Zot — the official beer of the city of Bruges, whose name means "Bruges Fool."

The crowdfunding campaign that helped fund the pipeline raised money from over 500 donors, each of whom received the most Belgian thank-you gift imaginable: free beer for life. The pipeline alternates between carrying the blonde and brown versions of Brugse Zot and the Straffe Hendrik, with a cleaning system that sterilises the pipes between batches using jets of cleaning solution.

Brewery tours run throughout the day and include a climb to the rooftop terrace, which offers one of the best panoramic views of Bruges — a detail the brewery mentions on every piece of marketing material, and rightly so. The view is genuinely excellent, and the beer at the end makes it better.