Molson Coors overhauls its aging facility to continue its Golden legacy - The Colorado Sun

It’s surprisingly quiet inside the new Molson Coors plant, a 200,000-square-foot addition to the original Coors site in Golden, save for the dull thrum of pipes, valves, filters, centrifuges and sanitizing tanks that will soon be responsible for turning millions of gallons of water, wort and yeast into fresh batches of Coors Light, Blue Moon or Banquet.

The facility is operational but not yet at capacity; the company is hoping to get things fully churning in 2025. Even then, the sonic environment inside probably won’t change much. The new facility, a crown jewel of Molson Coors’ G150 project — G for Golden, 150 for the company’s 150th anniversary — is rife with automation. Self-opening valves and self-cleaning tanks remove the manual labor demands of the older facility, a few hundred feet downstream.

The bustle of a 150-year-old factory floor has been traded for gleaming and streamlined new technologies that Peter Coors, director of G150 operations and the great-great-grandson of founder Adolph Coors, hopes will propel the company into its next 150 years.

“We had an aging facility and had to decide what we were going to do,” Brian Erhardt, chief supply chain officer for Molson Coors, told a crowd gathered Tuesday to toast the new facility.

They could either invest “a lot of money to replace a lot of equipment and a lot of parts,” while keeping their old facility operating, or they could invest “a lot more money” to build a new facility with the latest technologies, he said. Molson Coors chose the latter.

Americans consume beer more than any other alcoholic beverage on the market, but for the past two-and-a-half decades the biggest beer-makers, including Molson Coors, have been taking hits and facing declining market share — first from liquor companies rolling out novel flavors, then from the rise in popularity of craft brewers, and more recently from the supposedly healthier hard beverage alternatives, like CBD-infused sodas, hard kombuchas and nonalcoholic beers. In 2023, national consumption of beer fell by 3.5%, according to the International Wine and Spirits Record, which monitors market trends across all alcoholic beverages.

But these days, Molson Coors is more than beer.

Gavin Hattersley stepped into his current role as CEO of Molson Coors in 2019 and promptly rolled out a multipronged approach to counteract declining revenue, part of which was to grow into more of what they call “premium” products like liquors, seltzers and energy drinks. The company tried a hard coffee collaboration with La Columbe and an energy drink partnership with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. They entered the hard seltzer market with products like Simply Spiked lemonades and Topo Chico Seltzers, and acquired liquor brands such as Blue Run Spirits.

So far, the strategy seems to have worked. Last October, Hattersley announced an “acceleration plan” to build on the sales growth it experienced since its 2019 about-face. The plan is rich in language like “aggressively premiumize” and “scale and expand,” the latter of which, at least, is very much happening at their new Golden facility.

Over the past 150 years the Coors legacy in Golden has been prohibited, protested and aggressively political, and at other times celebrated for its innovation and its role in lifting Colorado’s beer-making industry.

Though the company is no longer concentrated on the grounds straddling Clear Creek — it now has 17 breweries in the U.S. and Canada — the new facility, which took five years and hundreds of millions of dollars to build, is a stake in the Golden ground where it all began.

Full-time workers at Coors were offered positions in different departments at the Golden plant, Peter Coors said, since increased automation with the new equipment requires fewer workers to make the beer.

“All our full-time employees that want a job will stay within the brewery,” he said. “They may go to packaging or warehouse, but they will be fully employed after this.”

The retired equipment will be “mothballed,” he said, meaning it will be shut down and safely stored until they figure out what to do with it.

And for those wondering, the famous 90-minute Coors Tours will not be rerouted through the new brewing facility.

That Coors is made with Rocky Mountain water has always been a special point of pride, and marketing, for the company. The Golden site, where Adolph Coors established the company in 1873, still pulls water directly from Clear Creek for cleaning and other tasks.

Almost 95% of the water that the plant uses from Clear Creek — a total of about 2.7 billion gallons annually, according to Water Education Colorado — is treated in the on-site wastewater plant and returned to the creek. In 2018 Molson Coors tried to amend its water augmentation plan to lease the water it returned to Clear Creek to other creek users. The city of Golden, along with other municipal creek users like Black Hawk, Arvada, Westminster and Denver, fought Molson Coors in the Colorado Supreme Court, and won.

But it was all smiles, handshakes and “great collaborative projects” between Golden and Molson Coors on Tuesday, when Golden Mayor Laura Weinberg gave a congratulatory speech. Weinberg brought up the Kinney Run project, a joint effort by Golden and Coors to mitigate flood risks at the edge of the Coors property, and create wider sidewalks and better pedestrian access to the creek.

Water use reduction also played a prominent role in the G150 project thanks to the new equipment and reclamation technology. The company is estimating it will save 80 million gallons annually (the original estimate was 100 million) through improved cleaning practices and less wasted beer.

The old fermentation tanks were built in the 1960s and ’70s, Peter Coors said. To clean them, a few times per month workers would “just spray a lot of water in there and let it clean everything,” he said. There was also beer that would be wasted during the process since anything below the tank’s release valve wouldn’t be drained.

Now, there are targeted jets that make the cleaning much more efficient. The new tanks drain from a cone shape at the very bottom of the tank, eliminating beer waste and creating an easier way to reclaim and reuse the cleaning water. Water used for the final rinse of one tank can be collected and used as the pre-rinse in the next tank.

After the toast on Tuesday, Peter Coors led a group through the humming new facility, pointing out 45 miles of freshly laid pipe and 65 fermenting tanks in four sizes. At the building’s western-most end, he stood in front of 18 new storage tanks, where a small group of workers from Alfa Laval, the company that built Coors’ custom parts, were monitoring the equipment across four computer screens.

“In the old cellar we had a very long aging time, the traditional German way of doing things,” Peter Coors said. The new technologies have cut the aging process down to about three weeks from six weeks, he said, then glanced down the thousand-foot-long corridor he’d just led the group through.

“It would be fun to walk through here with my ancestors,” he said.

CORRECTION: This story was updated at 9:00 a.m. on Oct. 17, 2024, to correct the size of the new Molson Coors facility. The new facility is 200,000 square feet.

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.

Parker Yamasaki covers arts and culture at The Colorado Sun as a Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellow and former Dow Jones News Fund intern. She has freelanced for the Chicago Reader, Newcity Chicago, and DARIA, among other publications,... More by Parker Yamasaki