Once in a while, I get a craving for a beer I just can’t find in my area. For example, the Mort Subite cassis lambic is something I haven’t had in forever.

I can order it online, direct from Belgium, at terribly inflated rates. I hope that one day I’ll run across it locally, but in many states, alcohol distribution is legally restricted to a tiny handful of politically-connected players.

Many states won’t allow formal liquor sales via mail, but few if any are likely to interfere with a single person shipping a gift to another person.

So I can’t get my beer; presumably, somebody somewhere else can get it, but can’t get something else that they’d like, which I might be able to get. There should be a web site that hooks us up, so that we can exchange beery gifts. A simple ebay-like reputation system would be useful to demonstrate that one is not unilaterally giving beer to people who won’t reciprocate, but the overall system could be incredibly simple.