Joseph Coors

Joseph Coors, Sr. (November 12, 1917 – March 15, 2003), was the grandson of brewer Adolph Coors and president of Coors Brewing Company.

Coors was born in 1917 to Alice May Kistler (1885–1970) and Adolph Coors II.

His siblings include Adolph Coors III and William Coors.

Coors married Edith Holland "Holly" Hanson (Holly Coors) (1920–2009) in 1941 and had five sons, Joseph "Joe Jr."

He graduated from Cornell University in 1939 with a degree in chemical engineering, staying to earn a master's degree in 1940.

His brother Adolph Coors III and cousin Dallas Morse Coors were his classmates, and all three were members of Kappa Alpha Society and Quill and Dagger society.

After graduation, he began work in the Coors Porcelain Co., the porcelain business that helped the company survive Prohibition.

With his brother William Coors (whose desks were located only one foot apart), Joseph refined the cold-filtered beer manufacturing system and began America's first large-scale recycling program by offering one-cent returns on Coors aluminum cans.

(1942–2016),, Jeffrey "Jeff", Peter "Pete" (born 1946), Grover and John.

He served one term as a regent of the University of Colorado from 1967 to 1972 and attempted to quell what he considered to be campus radicalism during the Vietnam War.

Coors was perhaps best known for his hard-right politics and his support of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, whom he first met in Palm Springs, California in 1967.

His brother William Coors once described him as "a little bit right of Attila the Hun".

His leadership helped expand Coors beer distribution from 11 Western states in the 1970s to the entire country by the early 1990s.

A founding member of The Heritage Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank in 1973 along with Paul Weyrich and Edwin Feulner Coors provided $250,000 to cover its first year budget and $300,000 annually thereafter.

He was also involved with the founding of the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, the Council for National Policy, and Television News Inc., a syndicated news service for television stations.

He was a member of Ronald Reagan's Kitchen Cabinet after helping finance Reagan's political career as governor of California and U.S. president, and was later nominated by Reagan to sit on the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

He served as president of Coors from 1977 to 1985 and as chief operating officer from 1980 to 1988.

Brewery Workers Local 366 in Golden, Colorado, struck the Coors plant in August 1977.

Coors continued brewery operations and replaced the striking workers who stayed out.

In 1977, after a regional agreement prevented the movement of toxic aluminum waste from aluminum can production across adjacent state borders, Coors set up the Mountain States Legal Foundation, headed by local lawyer James G. Watt to fight the environmental constraints in the courts.

Watt later became U.S. Secretary of the Interior, and appointed local attorney Anne Gorsuch as head of the Environmental Protection Agency to dismantle toxic waste disposal laws, causing an outcry that got her sacked by Reagan after 22 months, after which Watt was forced to resign for politically insensitive remarks.

Coors was also known to have privately donated $65,000 to buy a light cargo plane for the Contras' effort in Nicaragua during Reagan's presidency.

That donation went through National Security Council adviser Oliver North.

The new workers voted to decertify the union in December 1978, officially ending the strike.

The strike and decertification caused a 10-year boycott of Coors by the AFL-CIO.

In the aftermath of the strike, Coors required new employees to take lie detector tests, which were discontinued in August 1986.

He divorced Holly in 1987 after 46 years of marriage.

His son Jeff described him as an adulterer and a sinner.

He married Anne Elizabeth Drotning in 1988.

Coors died in Rancho Mirage, California, in 2003 after a three-month battle with lymphatic cancer.

Joe Sr. and Holly had 28 grandchildren, and 24 great-grandchildren at the time of Holly's death in 2009.

Grandchildren Holly, Brad, Doug, Timothy, Michael, Andrew and Jonathan are all employees of CoorsTek.