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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 $2,000 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 come in an all-aluminum two-piece beverage can. In
the early 1970s, 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 on an "illegal" shipment of Coors from Texas to
Georgia. 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. The
company finally established nationwide distribution in the U.S. in the
early 1990s.
Coors brewery in Golden, Colorado
In 2003, Coors was the third largest producer of beer in the United
States, and the second largest brewer in the United Kingdom through its
subsidiary, Coors Brewers Limited. There it controls the UK's most
popular brew, Carling, as the result of that brand's merger with
Canadian brewer Molson in 1989.
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 2004, Coors Brewing
Company announced plans to add brewing capacity to the Shenandoah beer
packaging facility in Elkton, Virginia, by early 2007. 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, 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.
Labor issues
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.
About 700 workers quit the picket line to go back to work, and Coors
replaced the remaining 500 workers, and kept making beer uninterrupted.
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.
Labor unions organized a boycott to punish Coors for its labor
practices. One tactic was to push for state laws to ban sales of
unpasteurized canned and bottled beer. Because Coors was the only major
brewer not pasteurizing its canned and bottled beer, such laws would
hurt only Coors. 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.
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. In 1988, the Teamsters Union, which
represented brewery workers at the top three U.S. beer makers at that
time (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.
Minority issues
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.
Coors encouraged the organization of its gay and lesbian employees into
the Lesbian and Gay Employee Resource (LAGER) in 1993. In May 1995,
Coors became the 21st publicly-traded corporation in the United States
to extend employee benefits to same-sex partners. 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.
Molson Coors
Brewing Company
Molson Coors Brewing Company (TSX: TAP; NYSE: TAP) is a company that
was created by the merger of two of North America's largest breweries:
Molson of Canada, and Coors of the United States, on February 9, 2005.
The Canadian subsidiary of Molson Coors Brewing Company is a part-owner
of Brewers Retail Inc., operator of Ontario's The Beer Store retail
chain.
According to the Molson Coors website, Molson Coors Brewing Company is
the fifth-largest brewer by volume with 42.1 million U.S. beer barrels
(30.2 million U.K. barrels; 49.4 million hL) sold in 2006.
On October 9, 2007, SABMiller and Molson Coors Brewing Company
announced a joint venture to be known as MillerCoors for their U.S.
operations that will market all of their products.
Corporate governance
The 2005
members of the board of directors of the company are: Francesco
Bellini, John Cleghorn, Peter Coors, Melissa Coors, Charles Herington,
Franklin Hobbs, Leo Kiely, Gary S. Matthews, Andrew Molson, Eric
Molson, David O'Brien, Pamela Patsley, and Sanford Riley.
Environmental Record
The Molson
Coors Brewing Company conducted a complete, comprehensive, and
voluntary investigation of its pollution and environmental emissions.
Coors was not violating the Clean Air Act but was encouraged by the
Environmental Audit Privilege and Voluntary Disclosure Act which
immunizes and credits organizations for conducting self-environmental
audits. These audits catch what the government does not and grant
immunity from environmental regulation fines. The United States
government had thought that Coors was a minor violator of emitters like
volatile organic compounds (VOCs), but the investigating proved
otherwise. It revealed Coors to be 17 times over the estimated value of
emissions. Molson Coors then provided the audit results to the Colorado
Department of Health which culminated in a $1.05 million fine for the
189 violations of state pollution laws--of which Coors and the United
States government had no idea. Although Molson Coors said they did not
know about volatile organic compounds they were emitting, they do claim
to be environmentally aware. Coors invented a new printing technology
technique which uses ultra-violet light to cure the print. This
innovation is more environmentally sound than the traditional gas
firing technique.
MillerCoors is
a joint venture between SABMiller and Molson Coors Brewing Company,
announced on October 9, 2007. The joint venture has the responsibility
of selling brands such as Miller Lite, Miller High Life, Miller Genuine
Draft, Coors, Coors Light and Molson Canadian in the United States,
with the purpose of combining all of their US brewing operations to
better compete against Anheuser-Busch.
Pete Coors has been named as chairman of the new company, and Molson
Coors Chief Executive Leo Kiely is the new CEO of the joint venture.
Tom Long, CEO of Miller, will be appointed president and chief
commercial officer.
U.S. antitrust regulators approved the joint venture on June 5, 2008.
The merger was completed on June 30, 2008 and MillerCoors began
operation as a combined entity on July 1, 2008. The combined venture
will be headquartered in Chicago, IL
The oldest
brewery in the world still in operation is believed to be the Bavarian
State-owned brewery Weihenstephan, found in the German city of
Freising, which can trace its history back to 1040 Although the Zatec
brewery in the Czech Republic claims it can prove paying beer tax in
1004.
The industrialization of the brewery
Beer, in some form, can be traced back almost 5000 years to
Mesopotamian writings describing daily rations of beer and bread to
workers. Before the rise of production breweries the production of beer
took place at home and was the domain of women, as baking and brewing
were seen as "women's work". Breweries, as production facilities
reserved for making beer, did not emerge until monasteries and other
Christian institutions started producing beer not only for their own
consumption, but also to use as payment. This industrialization of
brewing shifted the responsibility of making beer to men.
Early breweries were almost always built on multiple stories, with
equipment on higher floors utilized earlier in the production process,
so that gravity could assist with the transfer of product from one
stage to the next. This layout is often preserved in breweries today,
but mechanical pumps allow more flexibility in brewery design.
Early breweries typically used large copper vats in the brewhouse, and
fermentation and packaging took place in lined wooden containers. Such
breweries were common until the Industrial Revolution, when better
materials became available, and scientific advances led to a better
understanding of the brewing process. Today, almost all breweries are
made of stainless steel.
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