Shipping Cantillon back to USA

It's probably lowest risk and cost for you to fly these back yourself. Between packaging and shipping costs, you are looking at about 8-10euro a bottle, and if you pack light enough, you can bring about 8 to 10 bottles in a checked bag along with clothes for about 60$ one way. Cantillon also sells 12 bottle styro shippers that you can check in for 100 euro or so.

If you want to take the risk of shipping, contact the fine folks at Belgium in a Box or Etre Gourmet, they will pack and ship for a fee.

 

I know BiaB offers to pack your beers for a 20€/10kg, and EG is similar. Shipping is extra. Write to them for details.

 

BIAB offers a service where you can drop your bottles off at Brussels Beer Project (in Brussels, obvs) and BIAB will pick them up, pack them and ship them to you. My brother just used that and while it took about a month for him to get his bottles, he did get all of them. He got 29 375ml bottles and they charged 100 euro to ship plus 60 euro to pack them.

BIAB will also proxy ship from Drie Fonteinen, but a certain percentage (either 1/3 or 2/3, I think) has to be Drie Fonteinen bottles.

Either way, I've read comments about BIAB taking a really long time sometimes and not being super communicative, so it's good to have patience if you go that route.

Etre does proxy shipping, too, but they're not in Brussels. I think it's over an hour away by train.

I'm not sure if BIAB ships to California, as they had halted a few years back, but Etre told me via email a couple weeks ago that they generally don't have problems sending boxes to California these days. A lot of the boxes go through NY on their way to CA and there's no issue, and only some of the boxes that do go through LA get sent back, they told me.

All that said, I'd see what it will cost to check extra bags on your flight, as that will generally be cheaper and you'll have the bottles with you when you get home.

 

2/3rds needs to be purchased @ 3F. So if you're shipping 2 cases of Cantillon, plan on buying 4 cases @ 3F.

 

I just shipped with BiaB last week, I went to the store in Antwerp and shipped my beer. It cost €100 for shipping and €52 for packaging fees, but I also got 18 bottles of 75cl sizes in the box. You can see the team packaging the boxes for shipping, and can be certain that it’s packed very well. They also have a crap ton of beer you can choose from there, in fact , I found a bottle of ‘14 Cantillon Kriek while there. Kurt was super nice, as well as the rest of his team.

If you have time to make it up to Antwerp to BiaB, I recommend it. Plus they don’t care what you ship, it can be all your own personal beer or beer purchased through them. If you buy beer from them to be shipped, it will lower the packaging fees as well.

 

We’ll see how you feel about the box and packaging when your box arrives looking like it went through a paper shredder. I’ll never use them.

 

Interesting... I used BiaB to proxy pickup and ship the last Cantillon online sale for me. While communication wasn’t great (which I understand because they were slammed at the time) packaging sure wasn’t an issue.

 

Yeah my brother said his BIAB box was very well-packed. They put each bottle in a sleeve that kind of resembles a pool noodle. No issues for him.

 

BIAB sucks. Zero commnication, took forever for them to ship, and they mixed my 2 of my bottles with someone else's order. Beware.

 

Had absolutely no issues with BiaB, box came in with no issues, bottles were in great condition, genius to use pool noodles for packaging the bottles. Only complaint would be with Bpost not updating movements once it hit stateside, which is not BiaBs fault, not sure why they get a bad rap!

 

You were using the wrong tracking number. The barcode number listed on the Bpost tracking updates on USPS.

But BiaB sucks. Their boxes are flimsy garbage and their overall communication sucks.

 

Im using Etre and I hope that's better.

 

Anyone have more detail on Etre? A friend of mine picked up a few packages this weekeend from 3F beer days, and is sending them back for me via Etre. I've never used them before, so I'm wondering when they'll contact me to work out the shipping details, and about how long it takes after that to receive the box?

 

They will send an email to set everything up. Some people have started receiving their emails, but they will probably be sending boxes for the next month, so it might be a little while before you hear from them.

 

Updating an old thread to comment that BIAB has filed for bankruptcy.

Shame, too, they had a regular pickup at Brussels Beer Project and it was convenient to dump stacks of loons there before flying home.

I will not miss the aforementioned lack of communication.

 

So is there a way to do this with Etre Gourmet anywhere in Brussels? I plan on doing this at 3F but I can only do probably 4 non-3F bottles there. Is the only other way to do it, to travel to Etre Gourmet?

 

Might be worth asking them. As you've discovered (or known), 3F has regular Etre pickups, but largely for their product.