Coors Brewery
Near Idaho Springs, Colorado
The brewery in Golden was founded on November fourteenth, eighteen seventy-three, when Adolph Coors and his partner Jacob Schueler purchased an abandoned tannery on Clear Creek and converted it into the Golden Brewery. Both men had emigrated from Prussia. Coors put in two thousand dollars; Schueler put in eighteen thousand.
By February of eighteen seventy-four they were producing beer, and in eighteen eighty Coors bought out his partner and renamed the operation the Adolph Coors Golden Brewery. The key ingredient Coors always emphasized was the water: Clear Creek runs cold and soft out of the mountains directly through Golden, and Coors used it without pasteurizing the beer, requiring refrigerated distribution but producing a cleaner flavor than most national competition. When Colorado went dry in nineteen sixteen, four years before federal Prohibition, Coors pivoted hard.
The brewery was converted to produce malted milk, some of which went to the Mars candy company. Coors also launched a porcelain and ceramics division in nineteen twelve that became its own industrial company. The brewery survived all seventeen years of Prohibition and came back.
Today the Golden facility is the largest single-site brewery in the world, and free public tours have run here for decades.
