The story
Founded by Adolph Coors in 1910, in Golden.1
Adolph Coors and John Herold
Prussian-born Adolph Coors (1847–1929) opened the Colorado Glass Works in 1887 with fellow German immigrant Joachim Binder and James R. Ward to manufacture beer bottles for his brewery, the Adolph Coors Brewing Company, west of Denver. In 1888, the glass works, incorporated as Coors, Binder & Co., was idled by a strike and never reopened. The remaining building of the Glass Works by 1910, its warehouse, was leased to Austrian-born John J. Herold (1871–1923) and incorporated as the Herold China and Pottery Company situated upon the site at 600 Ninth Street in Golden. Herold used clay from nearby mines to make tableware and heat-resistant ovenware under the trademark Herold Fireproof China, with major financial support from Coors.
The now-abandoned clay pits form the western boundary of the Colorado School of Mines (CSM) campus. CSM professor Herman Fleck helped Herold perfect his glazing technique. Adolph Coors became the majority stockholder and was elected to the board of directors of Herold China in 1912.
John Herold resigned in 1912 due to tuberculosis and other health concerns, and Adolph Coors Company acquired Herold China in 1914. Herold returned later in 1914 to manage the plant, but left permanently in 1915 for the Guernsey Earthenware Co. in Cambridge, Ohio. Adolph Coors II (1884–1970) was the first vice-president (VP) and general manager (GM). CSM evaluated Fireproof China for industrial applications in 1914, and found it suitable.
The company began producing chemical porcelain in 1915 as a result of a World War I embargo on German imports. Adolph Coors' third son, Herman F. Coors (1890–1967), was named manager in 1916, during which year the plant's iconic brick face upon Ford Street was built. Employment increased from 37 employees in 1915 to 75 in 1917. The plant became the largest employer of women in Golden, with Herman Coors advertising specifically for female employees in the Golden Transcript. Herold China was renamed Coors Porcelain Company in 1920, and the trademark "Coors U.S.A." was first used. The Rocky Mountain Bottle Company, maker of Coors beer bottles in nearby Wheat Ridge and a joint venture with Owens-Brockway Glass Container Inc., came long after Coors, Binder & Co., and has never been affiliated with Coors Porcelain.
Rosebud porcelain and Prohibition after WW1
After World War I, Coors Porcelain made tableware and cookware bearing the trademarks Rosebud, Glencoe Thermo-Porcelain, Coorado, Mello-Tone and others. During Prohibition, the ceramic business was largely what kept the parent company afloat.
The original factory site at 600 Ninth Street in Golden was the only Coors Porcelain facility until the 1970s, and remained the company headquarters until a new facility was built northeast of Golden in the early 1990s. The 440,000 sq ft (41,000 m2) Ninth St. plant consists of several adjoining buildings that occupy four square blocks, and was CoorsTek's largest manufacturing site until it closed in 2021.
Herman Frederick Coors managed the company in the early days. Herman's older brother, Grover Cleveland Coors (1888–1954), began the fledgling company's foray into ceramic technology by inventing a tool for forming spark plug insulation in 1919. Chemist Harold W. Ryland (1881–1966) was hired in 1923, and worked his way up to GM and VP of Porcelain and mayor of Golden 1939–45 before his 1957 retirement. Germany became competitive once again in 1926, and put downward pressure on Coors' chemical porcelain business. Adolph I's death in 1929 put Adolph II solely in charge of the idled A. Coors Co. brewery and Porcelain both, until his sons Adolph III, Bill and Joe joined in the 1940s.
Herman Coors offered to buy Porcelain in the early 1920s after frequent management disagreements with his father and older brother, but was refused. Herman left in 1922 to develop clays mined by the Alberhill Coal and Clay Company for use in china that could compete with imports. He started the H.F. Coors China Company, a manufacturer of dishes for restaurants and institutional use, in Inglewood, California, in 1925. Grover also had friction with Adolph Jr., left for California in 1924, and eventually became a representative for the brewery there.
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The H.F. Coors pottery's trademarks include Coorsite, Alox flatware and Chefsware. Herman retired from Coors China in 1946, and was succeeded by his son Robert M. Coors (1920–2004). Robert's brother Dallas Morse Coors (1917–1996) was the VP. Robert retired in 1978, and sold the 125-employee company to Standex International Corporation.,
Standex was preparing to close Coors China and sell its property for redevelopment circa 2003. Mug-maker Catalina China Inc. of Tucson, Arizona, acquired the assets of Coors China from Standex, and moved the company to Tucson in 2003. The assets included a 200-ft-long gas-fired tunnel kiln.
Aluminum beer cans
In the 1950s, Coors Porcelain's parent company investigated the possibility of replacing steel beverage cans with aluminum ones, as part of a closed-loop recycling system. The effort was the brainchild of W.K. "Bill" Coors (1916–2018), the second son of Adolph II and the vice-president of Porcelain.
Coors formed a joint venture with Beatrice Foods (then parent of Primo Beer in Hawai'i), named Aluminum International, to develop the seamless aluminum can. Coors built a pilot plant at the southeast corner of 8th Street and Washington Avenue in 1955 for the aluminum can line. After years of experiments, failures and successes, including the ill-fated late 1954 rollout by Primo of the can which proved not yet ready for market due to flaws, Coors at last unveiled the perfected seamless aluminum can to the world in January 1959.
In 1970, Coors resumed their ambitious and aggressive program called "Cash for Cans", which operated throughout Coors' 11-state marketing area offering a penny a can. Coors success with the aluminum industry was a critical breakthrough in the development of America's recycling market and collection infrastructure.
The can operation eventually outgrew the Porcelain building (which was then absorbed into the main porcelain plant as Building 10) and moved into its present location east of the brewery in 1966. The can, end and bottle factories were jointly managed by Joe Coors as Coors Container Company from 1971 to 1981. Coors Brewing Company reorganized its 340-employee can, end and tab operations into a joint venture with the Ball Corporation in 2002, known as Rocky Mountain Metal Container LLC., Coors Ceramics began developing hot-pressed SiC-whisker-reinforced Al2O3 ceramic tooling for beverage can machinery in the 1990s.
On January 22, 2009, the original Coors can plant was named an ASM Historical Landmark by the Board of Trustees of ASM International, for its role in ushering in the age of recyclable aluminum beverage containers. The date marked the 50th anniversary of Coors' first aluminum can. The building, known though later years as Building 10, proved too incapable of adaptive reuse upon the plant's redevelopment commenced in 2024 and it was largely taken down, but its remaining glass block windows were salvaged and a remaining portion of its northeast wall kept standing with the goal of preserving it as part of the project.
Technical ceramics and company growth after WW2
The company gradually diversified its lines of technical ceramics before and especially after World War II. The factory was enlarged by 40,000 ft2 in 1960. Coors greatly expanded its product lines, reduced scrap and accelerated production with the aid of cold isostatic pressing in the 1940s; metallizing, tape casting and hot isostatic pressing in the 1950s; and multilayer ceramic capacitors in the 1960s. A four-story high, 32-ft diameter spray dryer with 5000 lb/hr capacity was installed in 1962.
Lawrence Radiation Laboratory awarded Coors a 2-year contract in 1963 to produce enriched urania-beryllia fuel elements for Project Pluto's Tory II-C nuclear ramjet engine, which increased employment by 230 to a then-record 1100 total. High-alumina (85 to 99.9% Al2O3) ceramics replaced porcelain (mixed-oxide ceramics, e.g., mullite) in many thermomechanical, electrical and chemical applications. Coors engineers invented fully dense, glass-free 99.5+% Al2O3 ceramics in 1964, useful for many applications where porcelain is deficient.,
Growth in the 1970s enabled Coors to build the 150,000 ft2 electronic ceramics Clear Creek Valley Plant east of Golden in 1970, and its first facility outside of Golden, an electronic substrate plant in Grand Junction, CO, in 1975. Coors made its first purchase of a competitor when it bought Wilbanks Inc. of Hillsboro, Oregon, in 1973. Two more competitors, Research Instrument Co. of Norman, Oklahoma, and Alumina Ceramics Inc. of Benton, Arkansas, were acquired in 1975 and '76, resp. Coors opened its first foreign factory in Glenrothes, Scotland, in 1981. Two more foreign subsidiaries were acquired in the early 1980s, an electronic ceramics plant in Singapore and a paper-tooling plant in Brazil. Coors began making silicon carbide, silicon nitride, spinel, zirconia and several other ceramic products by the mid-1980s.
The Joe Coors era
Joseph "Joe" Coors Sr. (1917–2003), third son of Adolph II, joined Porcelain in 1940 after graduation from Cornell University and stints at DuPont and National Dairy Products Corp. He was promoted to president in 1946, and became a member of the board of directors and an executive of Adolph Coors Company as well in 1952. Joe was named a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society (ACerS) in 1967, and an Honorary Member of ACerS in 1985.
Coors Porcelain becomes Coors Ceramics
Coors Porcelain was renamed Coors Ceramics Company in 1986, shortly after Joseph Coors Jr. (1942–2016),, succeeded R. Derald Whiting (1923–1995) as president. At the time, porcelain was a small part of the 12-plant, 2200-employee company's output. High-alumina ceramics were and remain the company's primary products. Joe Jr., a mathematician and quality engineer, had been at Wilbanks 1973-84 and was its president 1980–84, and the vice-president for quality at Coors Porcelain 1984-5 prior to his promotion. Joe Jr. promptly reorganized the company into two divisions, Electronic and Structural.
Chaired professor and ceramic research at CSM
Janet H. Coors (1912–1994), widow of Herman Coors, endowed the Colorado Center for Advanced Ceramics (CCAC) at the Colorado School of Mines in 1988 with $2 million, and established the H.F. Coors Distinguished Professor of Ceramic Engineering chair. Coors executive David G. Wirth Jr. (1937–2017), was appointed as the first director of CCAC. Dennis W. Readey left the Ohio State University to become the first Coors Professor and succeeded Wirth as director of CCAC. Readey, a Fellow of ACerS, served as president of ACerS in 1991–2, and was named a Distinguished Life Member of ACerS in 2002. Upon his retirement, Readey was succeeded as Coors Professor by Nigel Sammes, and as director of CCAC by Ivar Reimanis. Reimanis was promoted to the Coors Chair in 2012 upon Sammes' retirement. Geoff Brennecka was awarded the Coors Chair in 2022.
John Coors earned his B.Sc. in chemical engineering at CSM in 1977, the first of eleven Coors family members to graduate from Mines as of 2014. W. Grover Coors, a brother of John, earned his Ph.D. at CSM in 2001 and has been a research professor in CCAC as well as an employee of CoorsTek. VP Doug Coors holds a B.Sc. in Engineering Physics, Co-CEO Michael Coors holds a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering, and Co-CEO Timothy Coors (son of Jeff) a B.Sc. in Chemical and Petroleum Refining Engineering, from Mines. Michael was appointed to the Mines Board of Trustees by Gov. Jared Polis in Jan 2024.
CoorsTek endowed CSM with $26.9 million, the largest in Mines' history, for the construction of the CoorsTek Center for Applied Science and Engineering, in September 2014. Ground was broken for the new 95,000 sq. ft. (8800 m2) building on 2 May 2016 on the former site of Meyer Hall, the home of the physics department. CoorsTek employed about 50 CSM alumni at the time of the announcement.,
The Coors empire separates
Adolph Coors Company became a holding company in 1989, with Coors Brewing Company as its largest subsidiary. The non-brewing subsidiaries were spun off late in 1992 under a new holding company, ACX Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: ACX), with Bill Coors as chairman of both holding companies. The key subsidiaries of ACX were Coors Ceramics Co.; Graphic Packaging International Inc., with Joe Jr.'s younger brother J.H. "Jeff" Coors as chairman and president; Golden Technologies Company (GTC), a collection of R&D projects headed by former Wilbanks executive Dean Rulis; and Golden Aluminum Company, with Joe Jr. as its interim president.
Most of the ceramics-related GTC projects were folded into Coors Ceramics, while others were sold to investors or shut down with the demise of GTC in the late 1990s. Golden Aluminum was sold to Alcoa in 1999, and is now an independent remelter and rolling mill in Fort Lupton, Colorado. Graphic Pkg., previously Coors Packaging Co. 1974–88, merged with Riverwood International Corp. in 2003 and moved its headquarters to suburban Atlanta, but kept a 250-employee plant in Golden until 2010 that supplied paperboard packaging for Coors beer.
ACX and Adolph Coors Co. had many common stockholders including the Coors family, but were otherwise entirely independent of one another. Coors Ceramics Co. was no longer affiliated with the Coors brewery. Coors Ceramics' headquarters moved from Ninth St. in Golden to a new building in the Coors Technology Center in an unincorporated area northeast of Golden.,
Acquisitions and diversification
In an effort to broaden its business beyond mostly structural and insulating ceramics, Coors Ceramics made several acquisitions in the late 1990s, especially of suppliers to the semiconductor industry. Coors acquired plastics manufacturer Tetrafluor Inc. of El Segundo, California, in August 1997 for $15.8 million. Coors bought precision machine shops Edwards Enterprises of Newark, California, and Precision Technologies of Livermore, California, in March 1998 for $18 million and $22 million, respectively. Coors acquired ceramic maker Doo Young Semitek Co., Ltd., of Kyungbook, South Korea, for $3.6 million in December 1999. Coors purchased machine shop Liberty Machine Inc. of Fremont, California, US for $4 million in March 2000.
In 1993, Coors sold circuit board manufacturer Microlithics Corp. to VisiCom Laboratories, and its ceramic subsidiaries in Ocean Springs, Mississippi and Rio Claro, São Paulo, to undisclosed buyers. CoorsTek bought BAE Systems' Advanced Ceramics in Vista, California, in 2011 for $7 million, and added product lines in body armor, helicopter seat plating and ceramic heaters. In September 2013 CoorsTek purchased Innovative Medical Device Solutions of Fort Worth, Texas, for an undisclosed amount, merged it with C5 Medical Werks of Colorado, and created a new subsidiary, CoorsTek Medical LLC.
Coors Ceramics becomes CoorsTek
In 2000, ACX was dissolved and Coors Ceramics became an independent, publicly traded company under the name CoorsTek, Inc., Annual revenue was $334M and an operating loss of $32M was reported for 1999. CoorsTek was traded on the NASDAQ under the symbol CRTK. Joe Jr. retired as chairman of CoorsTek in 2000, and was succeeded by his younger brother John (b. 1956). John had been president since Oct 1998. Revenue jumped to $540M in 2000, with record operating income of $58.0M. Worldwide employment declined in 2001 from 4200 at the beginning of the year to 2400 in mid-2002, due largely to a semiconductor industry slump. Keystone Holdings LLC, a trust of the Coors family that owned 27% of CoorsTek stock, bought the remaining 73% it did not already own, and took the company private once again in 2003.
John Coors had been the president of Golden Genesis Corp. (GGC), a manufacturer of photovoltaic devices for solar power collection in Scottsdale, Arizona. ACX owned 55% of GGC stock (Nasdaq: GGGO), which it sold to Kyocera Solar Inc. in 1999 for $30 miilion
Saint-Gobain acquisition
CoorsTek signed an agreement in June 2010 to buy certain assets of the Advanced Ceramics division of the French conglomerate Saint-Gobain., The Advanced Ceramics division employed 1200 workers worldwide, and 500 at six North American sites, at the time. CoorsTek gained ownership of several longtime competing brands, such as Cerbec Si3N4 bearings, Solcera and Cerastat. The transaction was completed in January 2011, with CoorsTek assuming ownership of six plants in Europe; four in the USA; one each in Canada, Mexico and Brazil; and sales offices in Japan, China, Taiwan and Singapore. The acquisition gave CoorsTek a total of 44 facilities on four continents, and increased capabilities in SiC, Si3N4, mullite and steatite. Compagnie de Saint-Gobain retained ownership of its 22 High-Performance Refractories, Lo-Mass, Carborundum Abrasive Products and Hexoloy SiC products business sites.
Covalent Materials Corp. acquisition
CoorsTek acquired Covalent Materials Corp., formerly Toshiba Ceramics Co., and its three factories in Japan in December 2014 for ~$450M, the largest acquisition in CoorsTek's history. The transaction gave CoorsTek over 50 production facilities in 14 countries on four continents, with over 6,000 employees. Covalent began as Toyo Fire Brick Company in 1918 in Tokyo, and later became Toshiba Refractories Co. Toshiba Refractories merged with Toshiba Denko to become Toshiba Ceramics Co., Ltd., in 1968, with factories in Oguni, Yamagata; Hatano, Kanagawa; and Kariya, Aichi. Covalent's product line includes crucibles, heating elements, refractory bricks, and components for the semiconductor and flat panel display industries, made of silicon carbide, boron carbide, alumina, graphite, yttria and silicon. Its trademarks include Cerasic, Sapphal, Exyria, Glassun, Neobone and Ceraphite. The crucibles business was sold to Momentive Technologies in 2022.
CoorsTek revenues increased to $1.25 billion since the Coors family-owned Keystone Trust bought all the stock in 2003. CoorsTek claims it has turned a net profit every single quarter since then. Forbes magazine estimated that CoorsTek's cash flow reached $340 million in 2015. CoorsTek was worth an estimated $2.5 billion in 2015, about $200 million more than the family's 16% stake in the brewery.
CoorsTek sold the crucibles business from the Covalent acquisition to Momentive Technologies Inc. of Strongsville, Ohio, in 2022.
Production was discontinued at CoorsTek's original site at 600 Ninth St. in Golden in 2021. The company plans to redevelop the property into its world headquarters and other commercial uses. Much of the complex was deconstructed in 2024, with many artifacts from the site saved including those from decades of porcelain plant operation (including the kiln that made insulators for the Manhattan Project) and unearthed remains from the 1880s era Colorado Glass Works. The historic and iconic 1916 brick face on Ford Street, along with a portion of the plant's major 1926 addition, its 1940s buildings from the World War II era, combination steel and concrete tower building and a portion of the 1955 aluminum can pilot plant, were preserved, with modern buildout of the new headquarters from these commenced in 2025.
From Wikipedia’s article on CoorsTek, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5