Joseph Coors

Quick facts

Key positions

Biography

Joseph Coors Sr. was born in Golden, Colorado in 1917, the grandson of Adolph Coors, founder of the Coors Brewing Company. After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical engineering from Cornell University (1939, 1940), he joined the family brewery, where he helped refine its cold-filtered brewing process and rose to president (1977–1985) and chief operating officer (1980–1988). His brother William described his politics bluntly: “He was conservative as they come. I mean he was a little bit right of Attila the Hun.”

Coors converted brewing wealth into political infrastructure. In 1973 he provided roughly $250,000 to establish the Heritage Foundation, working alongside Paul Weyrich, who became its first president, and Edwin Feulner. Coors continued funding the organization through the Adolph Coors Foundation; by 1976 fellow donor Richard Mellon Scaife had become Heritage’s primary funder, but Coors remained a major backer and influential figure. He first met Ronald Reagan in Palm Springs in 1967, helped finance Reagan’s career, and after Reagan’s 1980 election joined the informal group of backers and advisers known as the “Kitchen Cabinet,” from which he pushed the appointment of his associate James Watt as Secretary of the Interior. According to multiple accounts, Coors also privately donated $65,000 to buy a light cargo plane for the Nicaraguan Contras, a contribution that ran through National Security Council aide Oliver North.

His tenure at the brewery is inseparable from a long record of labor and discrimination disputes. After a failed 1957 strike, Coors instituted polygraph testing of employees; sworn 1977 Senate testimony stated the tests were used in part “to eliminate the employment of homosexuals in the company.” A 1977 strike by Brewery Workers Local 366 over polygraph testing and dismissal practices ended with Coors hiring replacement workers and the local dissolving. The AFL-CIO ran a nationwide Coors boycott from 1977 until 1987; combined with an earlier 1966 boycott led by Hispanic groups over discriminatory hiring, the Coors can became a recognizable political marker — “when a beer can signaled your politics.”

When Coors died in 2003, the Wall Street Journal wrote that “the conservative movement simply would not exist in the form it does today without the profound influence of Joe Coors.” Through Heritage and his ties to Reagan, that influence outlasted him.

Sources

• “Joseph Coors,” Wikipedia (accessed 2025-10-31). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Coors
• “Joe Coors Brews Up the Heritage Foundation,” Philanthropy Roundtable (accessed 2025-10-31). https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/joe-coors-brews-up-the-heritage-foundation/
• “Joseph Coors Sr., 85, Dies,” The Washington Post, March 18, 2003. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2003/03/18/joseph-coors-sr-85-dies/fc026a48-3ae3-479d-8e4c-d5ecdbe7c808/
• “Coors strike and boycott,” Wikipedia (accessed 2025-10-31). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coors_strike_and_boycott
• “The Coors Boycott: When A Beer Can Signaled Your Politics,” Colorado Public Radio, October 3, 2014. https://www.cpr.org/2014/10/03/the-coors-boycott-when-a-beer-can-signaled-your-politics/