There's a lot of crossover between metal fans and beer fans.
There’s a lot of crossover between metal fans and beer fans. mararie/CC BY-SA 2.0

A full, standard keg of beer weighs just over 160 pounds and is pretty unwieldy. So it’s no surprise that the folks at the Wacken Open Air music festival in Wacken, Germany, are sick of schlepping them across fields every year, and have decided to do something about it. Come August, they’ll be able to pour 105,000 gallons of beer at stands around the festival grounds thanks to four miles of underground piping.

Music fans at the heavy metal festival are a thirsty bunch. According to Deutsche Welle, the 75,000 attendees each drink, on average, more than a gallon of beer over the course of the festival’s three days. Keeping up with that demand has been a struggle in past years. The new pipeline will provide enough pressure to pour six beers in six seconds.

When metalheads aren’t taking over the sprawling fields, they’re home to crops, so the pipelines are buried deep enough that plows won’t disturb them in the off-season. Conduits for fiberoptic cables, along with pipes for fresh and waste water, were installed too.

The festival organizers wrote that the pipelines are “a lasting investment in the infrastructure of Wacken.” Fans of Wacken Open Air will be set for years to come.