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As the US brewing industry matured and consolidated in the half century after Repeal in 1933, bottled and canned packaged beer came to dominant the market. Fully 75% of the beer sold in 1934 came from kegs through that would fall by nearly half (40-35%) by the 1940's even with the material shortages of World War II. San Francisco's famed Anchor Brewing Co., the last "draught only" brewery, started bottling their Anchor Steam Beer in the early 1970's.

By 1976, the year of the founding of the US's first "microbrewery", The New Albion Brewing Co. draught beer sales would account for a mere 12% of all beer sold, so it was no surprise when the first craft breweries choose to bottle their beers, often by hand or on old bottling lines from closed soft drink companies, etc.

(Below) Hand bottling at New Albion, 1979.

One of Wm. Newman's ales in their "cubitainer".