7 Surprising Coors Brewery Facts Every Colorado Beer Drinker Should Know
You've cracked a few hundred Coors. Maybe a few thousand.
I'm not counting, and neither is your doctor if you're lucky.
But there's a lot more going on in that can than Rocky Mountain water and a pretty mountain on the label.
Coors Started in a Tannery. Yes, a Tannery.
Back in 1873, a German immigrant named Adolph Coors teamed up with a Denver candy maker named Jacob Schueler. They bought an abandoned tannery in Golden and turned it into a brewery.
If you've ever been near a tannery, you know that's a heck of a glow-up.
By 1880, Coors bought out his partner and put his own name on the building, and it's been there ever since.
When Colorado Went Dry, Coors Got Creative
Colorado didn't wait for the rest of the country to ban booze. We went dry in 1916, four full years before Prohibition went national. So Coors had to figure out how to keep the lights on without selling beer.
The answer was near beer and malted milk. A lot of that malted milk ended up at the Mars candy company. So if your grandpa swore candy bars tasted better back in the day, maybe there was a little Coors in there.
They also ran a porcelain company using clay from around Golden, making things like tea sets and cookware. That side business grew into CoorsTek, which today is one of the biggest technical ceramics makers on the planet. Not bad for a backup plan.
Nobody Actually Knows Why It's Called "Banquet"
The story goes that miners in Clear Creek Canyon would wrap up their shifts by drinking Coors at banquet halls and tents. It's a great story.
It might even be true. But Coors' own historian has admitted they can't prove it. Sometimes the legend is all you get.
Coors Changed Every Beer You've Ever Opened
On January 22, 1959, Coors rolled out the first two-piece recyclable aluminum can. It was a little 7-ounce Banquet, and it took about $10 million and years of trial and error to get right.
Then they did something nobody else was doing. They paid people a penny a can to bring them back. That turned into the country's first large-scale aluminum recycling program.
So every time you toss a can in the blue bin, you can thank a brewery in Golden.
Hey, That's Our Mountain
Take a good look at the mountain on those early cans.
That's Wilson Peak, down near Telluride. Coors has been bragging about our side of the state for decades, and honestly, they picked a good one.
For Years, You Basically Had to Smuggle It
If you were back East, you couldn't just grab a Coors at the store.
That's the whole plot of Smokey and the Bandit. Burt Reynolds spends the 1977 movie hauling bootleg Coors from Texas to Georgia with half the cops in the South chasing him.
Coors didn't make it to all 50 states until 1991.
Coors Light showed up in 1978, which makes it younger than a lot of the people drinking it. And the Golden brewery is still the largest single-site brewery in the world.
Read More: Western Colorado Nostalgia: The Iconic Closed Bars We Miss Most
Raise One to Golden
So next time you grab a cold one, give a little nod to a smelly old tannery on the Front Range. Now settle this for us.
Are you a Banquet person, a Coors Light person, or a "whatever's in the cooler" person? Let us know.