A brief note regarding how you pack your entries. When my club holds our competition, we've seen just about every method imaginable - most bad.
If you pack your entries in solid styrofoam sheets with cylindrical cavities for the bottles, it's almost a certainty that they'll arrive unscathed. Next best is to pack each bottle in bubble wrap with cardboard cylinders over that. Make sure that the bottles are packed tightly so they can't move around inside the box. Finally, if you have access to professional foam packaging, that works very well too. I'm talking about the foam packing that some shipping places use where they squirt a fast drying foam mixture into the box which hardens.
No matter what method you use, place each bottle in its own plastic bag. Line the box with a plastic garbage bag as well. No shipper likes to discover a package leaking foul smelling fluids over everything else.
I've unpacked boxes that had loose bottles with styrofoam peanuts - no bags at all. The bottles banged together and broke, which then started to dissolve the peanuts since they were the environmentally friendly biodegradeable type. This accelerated the breakage. By the time we got the package, the box was so wet & rotten that it was falling apart. We've also received entries that were simply mailed and this is a big no-no here because Canada Post prohibits mailing alcohol. That aside, the 2 beers that were mailed were just put in a box with no bags and no packing material. The bottles were loose to roll around. We have no idea how, but they actually made it without breaking.
Oh, and be careful when packing your entries so that nothing else gets into the box.
This was discovered on an entry from Texas a couple of years ago. :lol: