The Beer That Won the West

Gerald Ford had a case of it tucked away in his luggage when he returned to Washington last month from a vice-presidential skiing trip to Colorado. President Eisenhower had his own steady supply airlifted to the White House aboard an Air Force plane. Actor Paul Newman refuses to be seen drinking any other brand on the screen. Until a court made him stop, Frederick Amon, 24, used to drive a refrigerated truckload every week from Denver to Charlotte, N.C., where he sold it to restaurants and country clubs for as much as $1 a can, better than triple the retail price of about $1.50 a sixpack.

The object of that foaming frenzy is Coors Banquet Beer, brewed from the waters of the 70 to 80 springs around Golden, Colo., 15 miles west of Denver. Unlike most U.S. beers, Coors contains no preservatives or stabilizers and is not pasteurized; if left unrefrigerated and allowed to get warm, it will spoil in a week. It is probably the only beer that is kept cold from the brewery to the customer. But its lack of additives and its brewing process greatly enhance its taste. For many connoisseurs, Coors is the Chateau Haut-Brion of American beers; to their palates, it is lighter, milder, drier and less bitter than most.

There is one drawback: Coors is available only in eleven Western and Southwestern states, and the Adolph Coors Co. has no intention of expanding east of Oklahoma. Within ten of those eleven states, the company outsells each of its leading competitors by more than a 2-to-1 margin. Coors accounts for 41% of all the beer sold in California, the nation's biggest beer-drinking state, and more than two-thirds of all beer drunk in Oklahoma. Altogether, the company produced eleven million 31-gal. barrels last year, making Coors the nation's fourth largest brewer (after Anheuser-Busch, Jos. Schlitz and Pabst), with sales of $440 million, up from ninth place a decade ago.

Since the beginning, every drop of Coors has been brewed in the same plant, which is now the world's largest brewing establishment. An average can travels 960 miles in refrigerated trucks and railroad cars before it is consumed. The Coors brewing process takes 80 days, as much as four times as long as some other big brewers take, but distribution is so efficient that a typical mouthful is out of the brewery and down the hatch in a month, as opposed to an industry average of three months.

Self-Sufficient. Coors has been owned by a single family since 1873, when Adolph Coors, a German draft dodger, set up a brewery on the banks of Clear Creek. His grandson, William, has been president since 1970, and the firm contains six other Coorses. As befits a company owned by rugged individualists, the firm is almost totally self-sufficient. Plant expansion is handled by Coors' full-time 1,000-man construction crew. The firm meets its energy requirements by picking combustible material out of its waste products and burning it, and by tapping its own natural gas fields. Coors manufactured all of the 2.46 billion beer cans that it used last year, and in 1970 became the first brewer to buy back used cans from consumers (at 10-c- per lb.) for recycling. When Bill Coors designed a two-piece aluminum beer can, the company sold the patent to major packaging firms rather than go big in the can-making business. Reason: that would have meant borrowing money, and in all its 100 years Coors has never borrowed a penny.

Bill Coors, 57, goes to work every day in old pants and a work shirt, and shares a cramped office with his brother Joseph, Coors' chairman. No executive has a secretary of his own. There are no bonuses or stock options. On the job, workers can--and do--help themselves to beer from strategically placed kegs, and they are requested to call their president just plain "Bill."

All is not beer and skittles at Coors. Mexican-American groups in the Southwest have mounted a boycott of the company's products because of alleged discriminatory hiring practices. The company denies the charge, and has not suffered noticeably from the boycott. The Federal Trade Commission has accused Coors of fixing prices and forbidding its distributors to carry any other brand of draft-style beer.

There are enough young Coorses to ensure a steady succession, but Bill Coors is not optimistic about the future for many U.S. brewers. Though Americans last year drank 20.3 gal. of beer per capita, up from 15.1 gal. in 1960, rising distribution costs and periodic price cutting by the big national brewers have forced some 660 breweries out of business since 1934, leaving a total of only 60. "Our long-term strategy is to survive," says Bill Coors. "By 1990 there will be only three major companies left, and we intend to be one of them."

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