From a humble birth in Germany to stowing away on a ship bound for America, Adolph Coors embodied the grit and hope of an immigrant seeking a new beginning. With no money, no papers, and an unyielding spirit, he landed in Baltimore, ready to carve out a life in a land brimming with opportunity but devoid of safety nets. This is the classic American story of a young man against the odds, driven by an unyielding will to build something lasting from nothing.
Adolph Coors didn’t just dream; he worked, traveling across the country and mastering the brewing trade before settling in Golden, Colorado. Facing floods, financial challenges, and the rough-and-tumble world of pioneer enterprise, his resilience shone through, leading to the founding of the now-iconic Coors brewery in 1873. Join us as Pete Coors shares the inspiring journey of his ancestor, a true testament to American entrepreneurship, hard work, and the enduring legacy built from a simple vision and pure Rocky Mountain spring water.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: And we returned to Our American Stories. And up next, a story from Pete Coors on Adolph Coors. Take it away, Pete.
00:00:25
Speaker 2: Well, so, Adolph was born somewhere in the 1840s in a little place called Barmen, Wuppertal, in Germany. Kind of an interesting story, people say. The Coors name is kind of unusual for German name. His birth certificate, he was signed in his Coors, K-R-S, which is very German, and his father actually signed Kohrs. And by the time his sister was born, about eight or ten years later, it was a Dutch magistrate who brought the double ‘O’ from their language, and it became “steel or as.” His father was a flower miller, died when he was ten. He had been a prentice three times in order to survive: once as a flower miller with his father’s trade, once as a printer, BookFinder, and those are three years indentureships, which, as I understand, in those days, that meant you got room and
00:01:30
Speaker 3: board, and that’s about it. And then the third one, in brewing.
00:01:36
Speaker 2: We don’t know the details of how or why he decided to leave Germany. He was always very proud of his German heritage, but he stowed away on a ship, landed in Baltimore, had no papers, had no money.
00:01:50
Speaker 3: Was able to work off his passage. As soon as he did,
00:01:52
Speaker 2: he started working his way across the country. And I guess it’s, you know, a typical Great American story of coming to a land of opportunity and freedom, but with no safety nets.
00:02:05
Speaker 3: I mean, he came here. You were on your own, as so many
00:02:09
Speaker 2: pioneers did after this country became free from the monarchial rule of England. And he worked on the Erie Barge Canal, as we understand. And he worked at a brewery in Naperville, Illinois—the Stanger Brewery—became general
00:02:25
Speaker 3: manager of the brewery there.
00:02:27
Speaker 2: Left, came further west, ended up in Denver, started business importing cask wine from California and taking it by pack horse up to the mining towns between Idaho Springs, Georgetown, Central City, Blackhawk, selling them.
00:02:43
Speaker 3: And that’s how he made a living. And then…
00:02:48
Speaker 2: I guess some of his German friends and Denver said, “Well, you know how to brew beer. We could use a good brewery.” Showed up with a financial partner. I think he invested about $10,000 in eleven acres in Golden, Colorado, where he had found a source of spring water. The brewery was incorporated in 1873, three years before Colorado statehood. His partner lasted about eight years and decided the beer business wasn’t going anywhere, and Adolph turned into a sole proprietorship. And he really had no formal education, but he had a practical education. And I think that was probably true for most immigrants
00:03:30
Speaker 3: at that time.
00:03:31
Speaker 2: They came with their skills, with their ability to do hard labor, and it wasn’t easy.
00:03:37
Speaker 3: I’m sure it wasn’t easy.
00:03:39
Speaker 2: And as I look at some of the pictures that we have in the archives, of the brewer workers sitting around the tanks and the kegs, it’s pretty obvious that they were a pretty rough crew.
00:03:50
Speaker 3: You know.
00:03:51
Speaker 2: He struggled, but the business was growing. In those days, there were over 20 breweries in Colorado. Most of the mining towns had their own breweries. We would equate the craft breweries today: boutique breweries. If you hike throughout Colorado and pay attention, a lot of these old abandoned mining towns and mining areas, you’ll find hops growing, hops growing wild. And he literally started by hauling beer by back horse, and then he began to buy properties. And pre-Prohibition, he sold beer by, like craft berries doing today, by having saloons and bars.
00:04:34
Speaker 3: We have a…
00:04:35
Speaker 2: listing, actually. 19—I think the first year of taxes were 1915—and he did a full accounting of all his properties in Denver and in southern Colorado and around the region. Prohibition changed all that, and brewers could no longer own a retail liquor—saloons and bars. Another interesting story about eight off. He needed to double the capacity of his brewery because they were doing quite well and growing. And I believe it was 1884—I don’t can’t remember for sure the date.
00:05:10
Speaker 3: He had just…
00:05:11
Speaker 2: completed the new facilities, and flood came down Clear Creek and wiped
00:05:16
Speaker 3: out his new brewery.
00:05:19
Speaker 2: And he had borrowed money from the banks in Denver to build that. And of course, beer sales primarily grow in the summertime, and so here is brewery in the spring has wiped out all of his inventory. Went back to the banks and said, “Look, if you’ll double down, I’ll rebuild and I’ll pay it off.” And he did, but he never borrowed another dime. He decided that that was not a good way to proceed. So really, the company didn’t ever borrow money until about the late 1880s. We’d been growing, and we needed the additional capital to expand the brewery. So people often asked, “Why a world in the ’60s and ’70s, when the company was growing so fast, were you only in eleven states?” And the simple answer is, we were. Every dime that we had was invested back into the company. Because we had no debt, we couldn’t borrow money to grow any faster. So that’s in the mid-’70s when competition from the East, particularly Anheuser-Busch, came more west, we began to expand our territory.
00:06:27
Speaker 3: And people used to…
00:06:29
Speaker 2: say it had something to do with quality, and to a certain degree it did. In eleven states, we could have pretty good control of quality. But the real reason is, we needed, in order to become a competitor with the big guys and keep them from bearing us, we expanded territory.
00:06:53
Speaker 3: The rest, I guess, if they say, is history.
00:06:55
Speaker 2: A couple of funny stories after Prohibition. Back in those days, a banquet was a big deal. You didn’t have fast-food restaurants. You didn’t have people on there, you know, going out to the clubs. And I mean, if you had a banquet, that was a big deal. And my grandfather, that to the—we had no marketing department per se in those days—said, “Well, I think we had a… well, this is, this is a beer that’s good enough for a banquet.”
00:07:24
Speaker 3: And so that’s where “Banquet” came from.
00:07:27
Speaker 2: And the other, other funny story, you know, now we have the Coors Banquet has the stubby bottles, and it’s a, it’s a retro. It goes back to the early days after Prohibition when we had stubby bottles. And I asked my uncle one time—I don’t know if this is a true story. And I asked my uncle one time, “Why did we, why do we go to long next?” He said, “Well,” he said, “the cowboys, when they go dancing, would like to, would put their bottles in the back pocket. Who I could dance, and the beer would slash out.” And so that’s why a long nex Gut started.
00:08:03
Speaker 3: Yeah. I don’t know if that’s…
00:08:04
Speaker 2: True, accurate, or not, but that’s why everybody went. Everybody went to Long Neck, and Stubby, everybody had pretty much had stubbies back in the early days after Prohibition. So now we’ve gone back to the… I guess they put their beers down when they go dance.
00:08:19
Speaker 3: I don’t know, but anyway.
00:08:24
Speaker 1: And special thanks to Monty and to Alex for the storytelling and putting that story together so beautifully. And a special thanks to Pete Coors and what a story he had to tell about Adolph Coors! Born in Germany, he became an apprentice and even talked about indentureships. This is back when young people would work for room and board, and that was it. And my goodness, by 1873, having come to America, moved all the way out to the West and learned not by formal education but by practical education—that is, experience. Forge informed a company that was incorporated in 1873, three years before Colorado was even a state. And all these years later, this family business—well, it’s still a family business. And that doesn’t happen often. The story of Adolph Coors and Coors Brewing Company, as told by Pete Coors here on Our American Stories.
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