Not only is buying whiskey from online and distillery stores in the UK a frustrating and expensive endeavor for continental Europeans (we recently published a guide on this) – it is also extremely difficult for small distilleries, especially in Scotland until completely impossible to sell alcohol in the EU.
Alan Powell of the British Distillers Alliance, sums it up in a single sentence: “It’s a total catastrophe”. The confusion about the required forms for shipping alcohol makes it almost impossible at the moment to send even a single pallet of spirits on the journey. On both sides of the new border, freighters, producers and trade customers are not prepared to cope with the changed conditions, which also differ from country to country in the EU. While large companies can still ship large quantities of whiskey across borders, small distilleries can hardly find freighters who take on the multiplied formalities.
As an example, the Article in Explica the Isle of Harris Distillery an, wo Simon Erlanger, the managing director there, faces seemingly insurmountable hurdles to get his products into the EU. Even if the example given by Erlanger is about gin, it is probably symptomatic: The German importer has sold out his warehouse and the distillery is currently unable to send new goods to Germany. It fails because the hauliers are unable to state transport costs.
Niall Macalister Hall, CEO of Turkey Mountain Distillers on the Kintyre Peninsula complains that no transport company accepts small deliveries of one or two pallets to the EU. Four different carriers would have been contacted, none of which would accept anything at the moment. Other distilleries with transports to Finland report similar things: rien ne va plus.
Alan Powell of the British Distillers Alliance also does not believe that the situation will improve substantially once the bureaucracy has settled in. Alcohol shipments from the UK to the EU would be much slower and much more expensive than in the past, because the procedure would remain complicated, because even with well-established authorities it would be three times as much work compared to before Brexit. And that would hit the small producers much harder than the big corporations.
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