Region & History

Where does Coors beer come from? From Golden, a town at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, about 20 kilometers west of Denver. There, German immigrants Adolph Coors and Jacob Schueler founded a brewery on Clear Creek in 1873. Later the Coors family ran the business alone, and the house at the mountain's edge grew into one of the most recognized names in American beer.

Colorado banned alcohol as early as 1916, four years before the national Prohibition that lasted from 1920 to 1933. During that time, Coors kept itself afloat with malted milk and ceramics, among other things. In 1978, Coors Light launched in a big way, a light beer at around 4 percent alcohol, and made the brand known across the country. Since merging with Canadian brewer Molson in 2005, the brewery has been part of Molson Coors. The Golden facility is considered the largest single-site brewery in the world.

The other story begins with homebrewers. Boulder Beer started in Boulder in 1979, and in 1982 members of the American Homebrewers Association gathered there for their convention, which grew into the Great American Beer Festival. Today, the Brewers Association, the trade group for independent craft brewers, is headquartered in Boulder. In 1988, Wynkoop Brewing opened in Denver, considered the state's first brewpub—a tavern with its own brewery.

In 1991, Kim Jordan and Jeff Lebesch founded New Belgium in Fort Collins. The brewery was employee-owned for a long time, until it was sold in 2019 to Lion Little World Beverages, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Kirin. Under the Brewers Association's rules, it no longer meets the criteria for independence.

There's no protected designation of origin here. In the US, "craft" means an annual output of no more than six million barrels, roughly seven million hectoliters, with less than 25 percent ownership by a large corporation. According to Brewers Association figures, around 420 such breweries now operate in Colorado, putting the state fifth in the nation.