Secret Santa EU

I hope it's not already too late for this thread, but if enough interest develops over the coming week or so, it should still be feasible to get this rolling.

Yes, shipping is a little more expensive for Europe than on a national level, but it's really not that bad and after all Christmas comes but once a year . Think of all those delicious, foreign beers you could be receiving in the mail! With Hermes, an "S" size parcel of up to 25kg costs 15€ and to make that worthwhile, you can easily fit up to nine 0,33l bottles plus some snacks in there.

I hope we have enough europeans on this forum to get this started, please let me know any thoughts on how this should be organized and how many bottles you think would be reasonable to ship.

 

Well, I'd say if we can get maybe six affirmatives for this by the end of the week, then people could use the last week of November to get the beers together and ship stuff out in early December. I could either do the pairings randomly myself or we ask a neutral party, if people prefer that. Maybe if we ask @Hoppsbabo really nicely, he will help out with this one as well .

If we can agree on how many bottles to send, that is... Since, as far as I can tell, the postage is the same for 3 or 9 bottles, I think it would be kind of a waste to only exchange 3 bottles, maybe we can compromise on 6? If I'm wrong about the postage, please let me know .

Beers sent should obviously be proper craft beers from your country, preferably ones that aren't widely distributed all over Europe (BrewDog and DeMollen come to mind, for example). Although if someone really prefers traditional local specialty beers then I guess we can accomodate for that as well. That's really something that people should sort out once pairings are made.

All of this is open to debate though, I would be quite curious to know how people feel about this.

 

All right, I think we first need to agree on the number of bottles to send. @Peekaboolu and @loebrygg , would you be willing to send 6 or even 9 bottles instead of just 3? And @Euroglot and @Erzengel , would you be willing to just send 6 bottles? We need to come up with some kind of compromise here.

Also, can anyone think of one more, preferably non-german, person to participate in this? We just need one more to get this show on the road! It would also be nice if everyone who has voted so far could post with a definite confirmation that they are in for this.

If there are any more concerns, please let me know.

 

Well, with Loebrygg and Peekaboolu both out, I think we're done here . I had my doubts about this actually taking off, to be honest, but at least I gave it a shot . It's a real shame there are so few Europeans on this forum...

 

I don't know if the costs really vary that much from country to country or if you're using the wrong parcel service .

That's from Germany to all of the EU (except Switzerland and Liechtenstein). However, since we only had 3 confirmed entries as of last week, I already called this off, unfortunately .

I did forget to mark @hdtrice earlier though, and I know someone else from the UK who *might* be interested, so maybe we can still get to 6 people after all...?

 

I think we really do have to call this off. Both guys from the UK dropped out and while I found another German that would leave us with only 5-6 people, all of which are German/Belgian.

Maybe next year .

 

Well, I think that if people just communicate a little this is not going to be an issue at all. People could just state their preferences along with their address details and their trade partners would know what to get for them: traditional or american craft.

I'd much rather handle it this way than set up rules because different people are gonna have different preferences. For example, I'd be just as gutted if I received a parcel from the UK full of Real Ale. Don't get me wrong, I like Real Ale, but I've had plenty of that already and would be much more curious about highly regarded UK craft brewers such as Buxton, Beavertown, Cloudwater or Moor.

Also, there's really no need to tie this a specific holiday. Once we've ironed out all the kinks, we might as well just do a Local Swap.