We’re going with Coors, because well, it tastes great, and it’s the silver bullet. Did I mention it’s delicious?
We’re always looking for a few other sponsors, so if you’d like to pony up some keg money, we can be friends.
A Little History on Coors
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 vin 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.[1] The company finally established nationwide distribution in the U.S. in the early 1990s.
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. [2] 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,[3] 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.
