The craft-brew boom has been sweeping the nation for a while now, but the practitioners of the movement remain steeped in tradition — sometimes to a fault. So when the Shaun O’Sullivan and Nico Freccia began canning their craft brews, it was met with some initial resistance. The two founders of 21st Amendment Brewery first met in San Francisco in 1995 while attending a summer brewing class at University of California-Davis. Both men had moved to the Bay area from the beer wasteland, or just general wasteland, of Los Angeles. Both were interested in craft beers and sought to further their involvement in the then-burgeoning beer scene. In particular, the two men shared an interest in opening a brewpub, but worried that their timing was bad. Back in the late ‘90s, the craft brew and brewpub bubble seemed about to burst. Moreover, the market was saturated with people just looking to make a quick buck. “A lot of people that had gotten into the business were doing it for the money and weren’t doing it for the beer,” Freccia said. “They didn’t really know anything about beer or really care about it.” Instead of leaping in, the two men took a few years to develop a solid business plan and find a proper location. By the time they got the pieces in place it was 2000. The economy in California was in the midst of a different bubble—the dot-com bubble, which was ready to pop. “In the neighborhood of San Francisco we’re in where a lot of dot-com businesses were,” said Freccia. “People literally started dropping like flies.” Following the dot-com burst, followed by 9/11 and the economic recession, things became much worse. As surrounding businesses went bust, so did the restaurants and breweries that surrounded them. Post-9/11, some 1,000 eateries (including brewpubs) closed in San Francisco, according to Freccia. In spite of the odds, the 21st Amendment brewpub hung on. Driven by a vision of what their business could be, the two men pushed on, and notoriety for both the place and its brews grew. Five years later, the economy had turned around, and the business partners began talking about expansion. Opening another brewpub location was out, given the exorbitant real-estate prices in San Francisco. Instead, the two decided to begin bottling their brew. O’Sullivan visited the Lions, Colorado-based Oskar Blues Brewery, one of the first craft breweries to can its beer—at the time, a practice widely tabooed by craft brewers. But something about it caught O’Sullivan’s interest, and he returned to California and told his business partner that he had seen the future: 21st Amendment should can their beers. “I thought that was the stupidest thing anyone said to me. I couldn’t fathom why anyone would say it,” Freccia said. “[But] The more we started looking at it the more I was thinking, ‘This is a no-brainer. I don’t know why more people aren’t doing this.’” They dove right in, buying a manual tabletop filler and steamer and beginning to can Hell or High Watermelon, an American wheat ale brewed with real watermelon, and Brew Free! Or Die, their signature IPA. Initially, the cans were sold only in the brewpub, but after a year, they began to gain wider acceptance. The brewers began to distribute their canned beers on a wider and wider radius. The practice has revolutionized craft beers, Freccia believes. And it’s true that one of the earliest successful craft brewers, Sierra Nevada, has just purchased a machine to can 700 beers a minute. They unveiled the new technology at a recent California Small Brewers Association meeting. “In the early days we had problems with our distributors and customers not understanding the whole thing, but that turned around pretty quickly,” Freccia said. “Good beer is good beer, crappy beer is crappy beer. A can is just packaging.”