What I see in Shaun is something I see in a lot of people I knew growing up in Pennsylvania’s Appalachian Mountains. There, the work you do, and the quality of the execution matters more than the scale you can produce it at, or how many people it can reach. You and the world don’t owe each other anything of particular importance. There’s no anxiety or sleepless nights wondering how you’re going to meet anyone else's expectations other than your own. And in the end, trusting someone else to do the job right isn’t nearly as critical as trusting yourself to do it at all.

American craft is going through an important shift where artisans who have prioritized the brewing lifestyle like Shaun has, are working in the same space as those who have chosen the brewing business. There is plenty of room for both of them. But Americans are generally uneasy about a lack of ambition when it comes to business — anything worth making is worth making a million times over, so it goes. Brewers that have spent time with some of Europe’s small-batch producers are returning with a different mindset altogether (Gerrit Lewis and Beejay Oslon from Pipeworks, and Fredrick Tunedal of Sweden’s Pang Pang Brewery come to mind). These curious upstarts don’t set out to own breweries as much as they’re attempting to carve out a role in their communities where they’re simply allowed to make beer for a living. It’s a delicate ecosystem.