# William Coors **William Kistler "Bill" Coors** (Aug 11, 1916 – Oct 13, 2018) ran the [[Adolph Coors Brewing Company]] as chairman from **1959 to 2000**, and stayed on as vice-chairman until 2002. He was the grandson of founder [[Adolph Coors]] and the older brother of [[Joseph Coors]]. Joseph built the political infrastructure; Bill built the brewery that paid for it, and fought the labor war that made the Coors name a political symbol. ## The engineer Bill Coors earned a Princeton B.S. (1938) and an M.S. in chemical engineering (1939) and joined the brewery as an engineer. His signature innovation was the **two-piece recyclable aluminum can**, introduced in January 1959 after five years and about $10 million of development. Coors had dropped steel cans entirely by 1971, and the format became the industry standard. When the family spun off its non-brewing businesses as ACX Technologies in 1992, he chaired both companies. He lived to 102. Bill and Joseph took operational control after the 1960 kidnapping and murder of their brother [[Adolph Coors III]], the heir apparent. ## The labor war Coors was the most aggressively anti-union major brewer in the country: - **The strike.** Brewery Workers Local 366 struck from **April 5, 1977 to December 14, 1978**. Their grievances included 21 listed grounds for dismissal and **polygraph tests at hiring** that asked about sexual orientation, politics, drug use and debts. Workers later voted 993–408 to decertify the union. - **The boycott.** The AFL-CIO declared a national boycott on April 12, 1977, and gay, Chicano and civil-rights groups joined it. It lasted until **August 19, 1987**, when Coors agreed to use union labor to build its Virginia brewery. ## The 1984 speech On **Feb 23, 1984**, Bill Coors addressed a Minority Business Development Center seminar in Denver. He said "the greatest favor that anybody ever did you was to drag your ancestors over here in chains," and attributed Africa's economic problems to "a lack of intellectual capacity." He apologized the next day, then sued the newspaper for misquoting him. The suit was dismissed. Within the year Coors signed agreements pledging up to **$325 million** in investment with Operation PUSH and the NAACP, and up to **$300 million** with Hispanic organizations. Both pledges were contingent on Coors sales in those communities. ## Why he matters for the vault Joseph Coors seeded the [[Heritage Foundation]] with $250,000 in 1973, and the family's money became movement infrastructure. Bill is the other half of that story. His decade-long fight with organized labor and the 1984 speech turned a beer brand into a political identity on both sides: something the left boycotted and the right drank as a statement. That made the family's corporate conduct part of the culture war long before [[Anti-DEI]] campaigns made that common. See [[Coors Family]]. ## See also - [[Coors Family]] · [[Joseph Coors]] · [[Adolph Coors]] · [[Adolph Coors III]] · [[Peter Coors]] - [[Adolph Coors Brewing Company]] · [[Molson Coors]] · [[Adolph Coors Foundation]] · [[Heritage Foundation]]