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| Coors Brewing Company | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Location |   Golden, ColoradoUnited States |
| Owner(s) | Molson Coors Brewing Company |
| Year opened | 1873 |
| Annual production | $5 billion U.S. in sales |
| Active beers | |
| Coors Original | Pale lager |
| Coors Light | Light pale lager |
| Coors Extra Gold | Light pale lager |
| Blue Moon | Belgian style wheat beer |
| Keystone | Pale lager |
| Keystone Light | Light pale lager |
| Keystone Ice | Pale lager |
| Aspen Edge | Pale lager |
| Killian\'s Irish Red | American Red Lager |
The Coors Brewing Company is a regional division of the world’s fifth-largest brewing company, the Molson Coors Brewing Company. According to the Molson-Coors website, [1] the division is the third-largest brewer in the U.S. The brewery in Golden, Colorado is the world’s largest on a single site.
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The Coors Brewing Company is the principal subsidiary of the Adolph Coors Company. In 1873, German immigrants Adolph Coors and Jacob Schueler, a successful Denver businessman, established a brewery in Golden, Colorado. Coors invested $2000 in the operation, to Schueler\'s investment of $18,000. In 1880, Coors bought out his partner in "The Golden Brewery". His pale lager, nicknamed the "Banquet Beer" or "Premiums" and is now known as “Coors Banquet" once again after being dubbed "Coors Original" for many years. It is said to take its flavor from the pure water of the Rocky Mountains. Coors’ company survived the prohibition era in America by diversifying into manufacture of other products including malted milk and ceramics. The Coors Ceramics business was later spun off as CoorsTek.
According to the Coors website, in 1959, Coors became the first American brewer to vin an all-aluminum two-piece beverage can. In the early 1970\'s Coors replaced the common "pull tab" opener on its aluminum cans with a new two-hole top, one large hole for drinking and one small hole for venting. All one had to do was simply push down on the perforated "lids" to open them. Also Coors had a "wide-mouth" quart bottle with the opening approximately three times the width of a conventional quart bottle.
For much of its history, Coors beer was a regional product mostly confined to the American west by legal restrictions. This made it a novelty on the east coast, and visitors returning from visits to the western states often made a point of bringing back a case. This iconic status was reflected in pop culture: in 1977 the movie Smokey and the Bandit centered around an "illegal" shipment of Coors from Texas to Georgia (in reality there was no law against transporting the beer across state lines). Boston Red Sox great Carl Yastrzemski was such a big Coors fan that when he loaded up the team plane with multiple cases of Coors for the return trip to the East Coast, some of his teammates jokingly wondered if the plane would be able to successfully take off.http://sonsofsamhorn.net/index.php?showtopic=15458&pid=639248&mode=threaded&start= The company finally established nationwide distribution in the U.S. in the early 1990s.
On July 22, 2004 the company announced it would be merging with Molson. The merger was completed February 9, 2005 and the merged company is called Molson Coors Brewing Company. In August of 2004, Coors Brewing Company announced plans to add brewing capacity to the Shenandoah beer packaging facility in Elkton, Virginia, by early 2007. Coors to build brewery at Shenandoah, Modern Brewery Age, August 16, 2004 Coors officials stated that this would "bring brewing capacity much closer to our important East Coast markets and distributors."
The Coors family members have played a prominent role in American politics and public policy, supporting many conservative causes, including providing a $250,000 grant in 1973 to found The Heritage Foundation(Russ Bellant, The Coors Connection: How Coors Family Philanthropy Undermines Democratic Pluralism, Political Research Associates, 1990, p. 21), one of the world’s most influential conservative public policy research institutes, and, via its parent company, the right-leaning think tank American Enterprise Institute. Chairman Pete Coors ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate from Colorado in 2004 on the Republican ticket.
In April 1977, the brewery workers union at Coors, representing 1,472 employees, went out on strike. The brewery kept operating with supervisors and 250 to 300 union members, including one member of the union executive board, who ignored the strike. Soon after, Coors announced that it would hire replacements for the striking workers.Adolph Coors Company (A) (PDF). Business Case, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College. Retrieved on 2006-04-24. About 700 workers quit the picket line to go back to work, and Coors replaced the remaining 500 workers, and kept making beer uninterrupted.Dana Parsons, Why did strikers return?, Denver Post, 3 October 1979, p,3. In December 1978, the workers at Coors voted by greater than 2:1 to decertify the union, ending 44 years of union representation at Coors. Because the strike was by then more than a year old, striking workers could not vote in the election.Karen Newman, Coors workers reject union by big margin, Rocky Mountain News (Denver), 15 December 1978, p.1 c.2.
Labor unions organized a boycott to punish Coors for its labor practices.Union at Coors May Be Broken But It Hasn\'t Halted Its Boycott, The New York Times, May 28, 1979, p. A7 One tactic was to push for state laws to ban sales of unpasteurized canned and bottled beer.Coors union backing Calif. beer roadblock, Denver Post, 5 December 1977. Because Coors was the only major brewer not pasteurizing its canned and bottled beer, such laws would hurt only Coors.Bill before Missouri legislature would ban Coors, Denver Post, 2 November 1984. Sales of Coors suffered during the 10-year labor union boycott, although Coors said the declining sales were also due to an industry-wide downturn in beer sales, and to increased competition. To maintain production, Coors expanded its sales area from the 18 western states to which it had marketed for years, to nationwide distribution.Bartell Nyberg, Coors brewing for long-term survival, Denver Post 22 February 1987, p.1G, c.1.
The AFL-CIO ended its boycott of Coors in August 1987, after negotiations with Pete Coors, head of brewery operations. The details were not divulged, but were said to include an early union representation election in Colorado, and use of union workers to build the new Coors brewery in Virginia.AFL-CIO ends 10-year Coors boycott, Denver Post, 19 August 1987. In 1988, the Teamsters Union, which represented brewery workers at the top three U.S. beer makers (Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Stroh), gained enough signatures to trigger a union representation election. Coors workers again rejected union representation by more than 2:1.Jeffrey Leib, Coors workers reject union, Denver Post, 16 December 1988, p.1A.
A Federal Lawsuit by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1975 ended in a settlement with the company agreeing not to discriminate against blacks, Mexican-Americans, and women.Adolph Coors Company (A) (PDF). Business Case, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College. Retrieved on 2006-04-24.
Coors encouraged the organization of its homosexual employees into the Lesbian and Gay Employee Resource (LAGER) in 1993.Justin Berton, The other Coors spokesman, Westword (Denver) 2 September 1999, p.28. In May 1995, Coors became the 21st publicly-traded corporation in the United States to extend employee benefits to same-sex partners.Michael Booth, Coors adds ‘partners’ to benefits,Denver Post, 8 July 1995, p.1A. When company chairman Pete Coors was criticized for the company\'s gay-friendly policy during his 2004 Republican primary campaign for the US Senate from Colorado, he defended the policy as basic good business practice.
Coors Light ad on a Toronto building
Coors is responsible for over twenty different brands of beerhttp://www.ratebeer.com/Ratings/beer/ShowBrewer.asp?BrewerID=113&OrderBy=1 in North America. The most notable of those brands are:
Others
Discontinued
Beers
Others
On October 9, 2007, SABMiller and Molson Coors Brewing Company announced a joint venture to be known as MillerCoors for their US operations that will market all of their products.[2]
Coors sponsored Premiership side Chelsea FC 1995-1997, while current sister Carling was title sponsor of the Premier League from 1993-2001 and currently sponsors the Football League Cup. The two brands also sponsor Rangers and Celtic. The clubs have worn uniforms with Coors Lite logos for exhibitions in North America, while elsewhere the uniforms promote Carling, which is not offered in the U.S.
"Official" beer sponsor of the NFL and NASCAR. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070926.RCOORSLIGHT26/TPStory/Business
Coors and/or Molson are beer sponsors of the NHL\'s Colorado Avalanche, Detroit Red Wings, and all six Canadian teams. The company owns 20% of the Montreal Canadiens; Colorado\'s George Gillett owns the other 80%.
In addition to its official NASCAR sponsorship, Coors Light has regularly sponsored cars in the series, most recently for Chip Ganassi Racing. Drivers to have Coors backing have included David Stremme, Bill Elliott, Sterling Marlin, and Kyle Petty.
Coors holds the naming rights to Coors Field in Denver, Colorado, home of the Colorado Rockies baseball team.
The Coors Events Center on the campus of the University of Colorado at Boulder in Boulder, Colorado is named after Coors.
Coors Amphitheater, formerly Fiddler\'s Green, is a well known Denver concert venue.
Even without official sponsorships, Coors and/or Molson beers can be purchased at many other sports and entertainment venues across North America.
Coors sponsor English rugby league side Workington Town from the 2007 season, as well as the Belfast Giants.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia
