I'm hoping some of you may have experience shipping quantities of beer from Europe to the United States. I'm not talking 12 bottles that I can check with my luggage - - I'm talking cases to stock my beer cellar. I'll be traveling to Belgium this fall and I'm considering shipping as much as I can. Obviously there will be customs rules to comply with and duties, but I'm prepared to navigate that as needed. Any help is greatly appreciated.
What beers are you planning on bringing, that can't be bought stateside? I can't imagine you'll be able to obtain "cases" of 'loons... in the case of 3F and the like I can't imagine you'll be coming out ahead shopping, packing, shipping, and paying duty, over just hunting them down in the U.S. My dad semi-regularly receives BiaB or Mikkeller for me in Italy/France and mules it home, but we are talking <12btls. He usually pleads innocence if over the limit, and I think one time they asked him to pay a small duty. If you're talking many times the volume of this, sounds very expensive.
I'm going to watch this thread. A buddy of mine from the UK wants to do a beer trade but I don't know where to begin....obviously I googled a bunch of shit but more up to date info always helps. I've heard that usps flat rate boxes are the way to go for outbound shipments. Not sure about receiving though, that's the tricky part I presume.
crate it up.....put it on a ship......pick it up on the East coast well down the road......no idea on price but would think for the volume you are talking about it would be less than mailing it all...good luck Enjoy
Yeah, I was thinking that a pallet would be the best option. I've shipped pallets of personal effects overseas and the pricing was based on the cubic foot, which turned out to be pretty reasonable.
IF you know someone in the military that is willing to play along, use their APO system. Cost will be the same as shipping from one point in the states to another. Customs--different story. You may lose every bit of it. There are threads from some time ago lurking here somewhere.
It will cost YOU a fortune to ship it. In addition, quantities like that have all kinds of custom issues to deal with. Enjoy what you can and find out if any way some (or something like it) gets distributed to US. We get plenty of amazing stuff over here.
