A Heavy Metal Festival in Germany Will Have a 4-Mile Beer Pipeline

It’s no secret that Germans love beer. And now they’ve perfected a creative way to dispense massive volumes of it to the public: through beer pipelines.

Munich Oktoberfest relies on underground pipes to serve millions of guests, and in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, bars near a soccer stadium called the Veltines-Arena are interconnected by a 3-mile, above-ground beer pipeline. Now, Atlas Obscura reports that the Wacken Open Air music festival—an annual heavy metal celebration held in the rural village of Wacken, Germany—will keep their guests drunk and happy with a 4-mile beer pipeline.

This year, the Wacken Open Air festival runs from Thursday, August 3 through Saturday, August 5. It attracts about 75,000 heavy-drinking fans each year; on average, each person consumes more than a gallon of beer during the three-day festival, according to German newspaper Deutsche Welle.

The new beer pipeline will allow vendors to serve 105,000 gallons of beer, with enough pressure to pour a beer per second. But even though they’ll be drinking from it all day, attendees won’t be able to see it: The festival is held on farmland, so the pipes are buried deep beneath the ground. That way, farmers’ plows won’t disturb them during the off-season, allowing revelers to enjoy beer-fueled events for years to come.

Germany isn’t the only country to use beer pipelines: For example, De Halve Maan, a brewery in Bruges, Belgium, has a 2-mile pipe that runs from the city-based brewery to a suburban bottling plant. And in the U.S., the Cleveland-based Great Lakes Brewing Company uses an underground pipeline to supply its bar across the street with brew.