Heavy Metal Festival Builds Beer Pipeline In Germany

Nobody is going to go thirsty at the annual heavy metal music festival in Wacken, Germany, this year, because the tiny town is preparing for its visitors by installing an actual pipeline to pump beer into the festivities so nobody has to wait on trucks or deliveries before pouring out a cold one.

According to The Local, the heavy metal festival at Wacken consumes an average of 400,000 liters of beer every year. Wacken itself is a tiny town with a population of just 1,800 people, but every year the festival–featuring 150 acts including huge stars like Marilyn Manson and Alice Cooper–draws an audience of more than 75,000 heavy metal fans to what is otherwise a bucolic German setting. And those fans are thirsty.

In previous years, the Wacken festival relied on trucks to bring in the beer, but that meant dozens of trucks and dozens of barrels of beer, and that meant a lot of wear and tear on the roads and grounds to bring in the barrels and then take the empty ones away. Since the festival is an annual event, the town finally decided that laying down a pipeline would be a more efficient and sustainable option than trying to truck everything in.

The town is also laying pipelines for drinking water, sewage, electricity, and fiber optics. The town assures everyone that the beer pipeline will be kept clean and hygienic according to all German beer-pouring laws, and also the pipeline is extremely efficient. Bartenders can theoretically pour six beers per second from the pipeline, if they find a bartender with the speed to pull it off.