The Next Session, and My Beer Rankings

I've been doing these "The Session" blogs on a monthly basis since discovering them earlier this year. If you don't know it's a first Friday of every month where bloggers around the world write about a particular topic related to Beer. For the upcoming August Session the theme is “Happy Anniversary”. That is blogger are encouraged to:

"Use this as an excuse to celebrate. Open a limited release anniversary beer from your favorite brewer. Enjoy that special beer you normally only open on your wedding anniversary or birthday. Either way, tell us about it. Why is it a beer you may only drink once a year? Why is that brewery’s annual release the one you selected?"

I will be contributing an entry, though I'm not yet sure what the beer will be. Stay tuned.

As for my rankings of beers tried recently, I put them up mostly on Beer Advocate, you can locate them under my ID robbyc1 by going directly to this link. Under the Beer Karma section click on the "beer reviews" link to see the 60 or so beers I have reviewed.

You can also see my Wants (usually out of market brews I can't easily obtain). I can be very appreciative of anyone who can find these and ship them to me, alert me if you can to arrange details! For those who don't know Chicago, while a substantial beer market, suffers from a concentration of problematic distributors, they are rumored to be Mob controlled, and very difficult to deal with, thus many brewers simply choose to stay out of this market. Luckily, beer can be sent to Illinois (Fedex, UPS). According to a currently operating retailer, they can only ship beer to 23 States, including CA, CO, DC, FL, GA, ID, IL, IA, LA, MN, NE, NM, NV, NH, NC, ND, OH, OR, SC, TX, VA, WA, WV, WI. Private sellers/traders are limited only by the shipper's rules, and to know more here's a good article.