July 23, 2004
Coors marries Molson

Meet Molson Coors Brewing.


Adolph Coors Co. agreed Thursday to inherit a Canadian cousin and take a back seat in naming rights under the proposed Molson Coors Brewing Co.

In what company officials described as a merger of equals, Pete Coors and Eric Molson, chairmen of the respective firms, said the $6 billion deal will help the historic breweries maintain their centuries of family control while giving them more financial strength to compete against the Budweisers, SABMillers and Heinekens of the beer world.

Under the merger agreement, the Coors and Molson companies would maintain dual headquarters: Molson in its home city of Montreal and Coors in metro Denver, at a site not yet determined, but separate from its brewery in Golden.

Officials said they expect the merger to produce $175 million a year in cost savings by 2007. The biggest component, representing savings of $60 million, would come from what O'Neill called was described as "optimization" of Molson's five breweries in Canada and Coors' two, in Golden and Memphis, Tenn.


I first tasted Coors beer in 1982, when we had a family reunion in Colorado. You couldn't get Coors in New York back then, so the novelty appealed to me far more than the beer ever did. Once I learned to appreciate real beer, sometime around my senior year of college, I stopped drinking wimpy downstream beers like Coors, and I never looked back. Finding out about Adolph Coors' politics later just made me feel better about it, but really, it was all about the beer.

Colorado Luis speculates how the merger might affect Pete Coors' Senate bid. As for me, the official Rules of Texas Progressive Blogging state that I cannot mention Coors Beer without also mentioning the Austin Lounge Lizards classic song A Case of Coors Beer. So there.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on July 23, 2004 to Bidness | TrackBack
Comments

When I consider how many Molson fans there are in my family, I wonder how many of them consider the merger of Molson and Coors to be blasphemy?

Personally, I prefer a Labatt's 50 or a homebrew.

Posted by: William Hughes on July 23, 2004 5:05 PM

A cold Coors Light is a pretty carb-friendly beer, and hence one that I knock down with too much regularity. But it has to be really cold or it's just horrible (as opposed to bad).

Posted by: kevin whited on July 23, 2004 5:30 PM

hey, except for the nitrates and the fact that it tastes like rusty tap water and the whole American Nazi Party thing, it's good stuff!

Posted by: julia on July 23, 2004 7:02 PM

My first Coors was a bottle of near-beer in Durango when I was 20 and the legal age was 21. If you think the ordinary version is bad, you should have had that one. Pure Rocky Mt. water indeed.

Posted by: Linkmeister on July 23, 2004 7:59 PM

in the good old days (early '70's) Coors was referred to in NM as Colorado Coolaid. 'nuf said ---------- it still is.

Posted by: charlie on July 23, 2004 11:47 PM

I have a simple rule - if the beer is the same color going in and coming out, I don't want it. (I make a few rare exceptions, mostly for Belgian blondes, but not many.)

"Molson Coors" just sounds gross. Ick.

Posted by: Amy on July 27, 2004 6:42 AM