# Adolph Coors **Adolph Hermann Joseph Coors** (1847–1929) was a Prussian immigrant who founded the Adolph Coors Brewing Company in Golden, Colorado, in 1873 — creating the brewery that would anchor the [[Coors Family]] dynasty for over 150 years and generate the wealth that his grandson [[Joseph Coors]] would channel into building the modern conservative movement. ## Background - Born February 4, 1847, in Barmen, Rhine Province, Prussia (now Wuppertal, Germany) - Arrived in the United States in 1868 as a stowaway - Worked in breweries in the Midwest before heading west - Founded the Golden Brewery (later Adolph Coors Brewing Company) in 1873 with partner Jacob Schueler - Survived Prohibition by pivoting to malted milk and porcelain production - Died June 5, 1929, in Virginia Beach, Virginia — officially ruled an accidental fall from a hotel window, though widely suspected as suicide ## Why he matters for the KB Adolph Coors is the immigrant-founder origin story of the [[Coors Family]] dynasty — the Prussian stowaway whose Golden, Colorado brewery became the foundation for a three-generation political dynasty that seeded [[Heritage Foundation]], the [[Free Congress Foundation]], and much of the [[New Right]]'s institutional infrastructure. He is the founding node of the [[Coors Family]] dynasty page. ## The dynasty he started Coors is in the vault for what his heirs did with the money, and the sequence is the pattern the [[Dynasties Hub]] pages look for: a founder with no politics beyond his business; a second generation (Adolph Jr., who ran the company through Prohibition and the 1930s) that fought unions and the New Deal; and a third — [[Joseph Coors]] and his brothers — that converted a regional brewery's profits into the [[Heritage Foundation]] (1973), the [[Free Congress Foundation]], the [[Mountain States Legal Foundation]] (1977) and, through the [[Castle Rock Foundation]], a further generation of grants. The 1977–87 boycott of Coors beer by unions, Latinos and gay organizations over the family's politics and hiring practices is the first modern case of a consumer brand paying for its owners' movement — the precedent for every "go woke, go broke" and counter-boycott fight since. The brewery merged into Molson Coors in 2005; the family's political apparatus did not merge into anything.