CoorsTek

CoorsTek, Inc. is a privately owned manufacturer of technical ceramics for aerospace, automotive, chemical, electronics, medical, metallurgical, oil and gas, semiconductor and many other industries. CoorsTek headquarters and primary factories are located in Golden, Colorado, US. The company is wholly owned by Keystone Holdings LLC, a trust of the Coors family. John K. Coors, a great-grandson of founder and brewing magnate Adolph Coors Sr., and the fifth and youngest son of longtime chairman and president Joseph Coors, retired as president and chairman in January 2020 after 22 years.

History

Adolph Coors and John Herold

n-born Adolph Coors opened the Colorado Glass Works in 1887 with fellow German immigrant Joachim Binder and James R. Ward to manufacture beer bottles for his brewery, the Adolph Coors Brewing Company, west of Denver. In 1888, the glass works, incorporated as Coors, Binder & Co., was idled by a strike and never reopened. The remaining building of the Glass Works by 1910, its warehouse, was leased to Austrian-born John J. Herold and incorporated as the Herold China and Pottery Company situated upon the site at 600 Ninth Street in Golden. Herold used clay from nearby mines to make tableware and heat-resistant ovenware under the trademark Herold Fireproof China, with major financial support from Coors.
The now-abandoned clay pits form the western boundary of the Colorado School of Mines campus. CSM professor Herman Fleck helped Herold perfect his glazing technique. Adolph Coors became the majority stockholder and was elected to the board of directors of Herold China in 1912.
John Herold resigned in 1912 due to tuberculosis and other health concerns, and Adolph Coors Company acquired Herold China in 1914. Herold returned later in 1914 to manage the plant, but left permanently in 1915 for the Guernsey Earthenware Co. in Cambridge, Ohio. Adolph Coors II was the first vice-president and general manager. CSM evaluated Fireproof China for industrial applications in 1914, and found it suitable.
The company began producing chemical porcelain in 1915 as a result of a World War I embargo on German imports. Adolph Coors' third son, Herman F. Coors, was named manager in 1916, during which year the plant's iconic brick face upon Ford Street was built. Employment increased from 37 employees in 1915 to 75 in 1917. The plant became the largest employer of women in Golden, with Herman Coors advertising specifically for female employees in the Golden Transcript. Herold China was renamed Coors Porcelain Company in 1920, and the trademark "Coors U.S.A." was first used. The Rocky Mountain Bottle Company, maker of Coors beer bottles in nearby Wheat Ridge and a joint venture with Owens-Brockway Glass Container Inc., came long after Coors, Binder & Co., and has never been affiliated with Coors Porcelain.

Rosebud porcelain and Prohibition after WW1

After World War I, Coors Porcelain made tableware and cookware bearing the trademarks Rosebud, Glencoe Thermo-Porcelain, Coorado, Mello-Tone and others. During Prohibition, the ceramic business was largely what kept the parent company afloat.
The original factory site at 600 Ninth Street in Golden was the only Coors Porcelain facility until the 1970s, and remained the company headquarters until a new facility was built northeast of Golden in the early 1990s. The Ninth St. plant consists of several adjoining buildings that occupy four square blocks, and was CoorsTek's largest manufacturing site until it closed in 2021.
Herman Frederick Coors managed the company in the early days. Herman's older brother, Grover Cleveland Coors, began the fledgling company's foray into ceramic technology by inventing a tool for forming spark plug insulation in 1919. Chemist Harold W. Ryland was hired in 1923, and worked his way up to GM and VP of Porcelain and mayor of Golden 1939–45 before his 1957 retirement. Germany became competitive once again in 1926, and put downward pressure on Coors' chemical porcelain business. Adolph I's death in 1929 put Adolph II solely in charge of the idled A. Coors Co. brewery and Porcelain both, until his sons Adolph III, Bill and Joe joined in the 1940s.
Herman Coors offered to buy Porcelain in the early 1920s after frequent management disagreements with his father and older brother, but was refused. Herman left in 1922 to develop clays mined by the Alberhill Coal and Clay Company for use in china that could compete with imports. He started the H.F. Coors China Company, a manufacturer of dishes for restaurants and institutional use, in Inglewood, California, in 1925. Grover also had friction with Adolph Jr., left for California in 1924, and eventually became a representative for the brewery there.
The H.F. Coors pottery's trademarks include Coorsite, Alox flatware and Chefsware. Herman retired from Coors China in 1946, and was succeeded by his son Robert M. Coors. Robert's brother Dallas Morse Coors was the VP. Robert retired in 1978, and sold the 125-employee company to Standex International Corporation.^,
Standex was preparing to close Coors China and sell its property for redevelopment circa 2003. Mug-maker Catalina China Inc. of Tucson, Arizona, acquired the assets of Coors China from Standex, and moved the company to Tucson in 2003. The assets included a 200-ft-long gas-fired tunnel kiln.
Image:CoorsTek ceramics1.jpg|thumb|right|Figure 1: CoorsTek ceramic products. All are glazed porcelain except C. A Fisher filtration funnel; B Buchner funnel; C 99.8% alumina crucible; D Desiccator plate; E Commemorative thimble-size stein for brewery visitors; F 95-mm diameter crucible rack.

Aluminum beer cans

In the 1950s, Coors Porcelain's parent company investigated the possibility of replacing steel beverage cans with aluminum ones, as part of a closed-loop recycling system. The effort was the brainchild of W.K. "Bill" Coors, the second son of Adolph II and the vice-president of Porcelain.
Coors formed a joint venture with Beatrice Foods, named Aluminum International, to develop the seamless aluminum can. Coors built a pilot plant at the southeast corner of 8th Street and Washington Avenue in 1955 for the aluminum can line. After years of experiments, failures and successes, including the ill-fated late 1954 rollout by Primo of the can which proved not yet ready for market due to flaws, Coors at last unveiled the perfected seamless aluminum can to the world in January 1959.
In 1970, Coors resumed their ambitious and aggressive program called "Cash for Cans", which operated throughout Coors' 11-state marketing area offering a penny a can. Coors success with the aluminum industry was a critical breakthrough in the development of America's recycling market and collection infrastructure.
The can operation eventually outgrew the Porcelain building and moved into its present location east of the brewery in 1966. The can, end and bottle factories were jointly managed by Joe Coors as Coors Container Company from 1971 to 1981. Coors Brewing Company reorganized its 340-employee can, end and tab operations into a joint venture with the Ball Corporation in 2002, known as Rocky Mountain Metal Container LLC.^, Coors Ceramics began developing hot-pressed SiC-whisker-reinforced Al₂O₃ ceramic tooling for beverage can machinery in the 1990s.
On January 22, 2009, the original Coors can plant was named an ASM Historical Landmark by the Board of Trustees of ASM International, for its role in ushering in the age of recyclable aluminum beverage containers. The date marked the 50th anniversary of Coors' first aluminum can. The building, known though later years as Building 10, proved too incapable of adaptive reuse upon the plant's redevelopment commenced in 2024 and it was largely taken down, but its remaining glass block windows were salvaged and a remaining portion of its northeast wall kept standing with the goal of preserving it as part of the project.

Technical ceramics and company growth after WW2

The company gradually diversified its lines of technical ceramics before and especially after World War II. The factory was enlarged by 40,000 ft² in 1960. Coors greatly expanded its product lines, reduced scrap and accelerated production with the aid of cold isostatic pressing in the 1940s; metallizing, tape casting and hot isostatic pressing in the 1950s; and multilayer ceramic capacitors in the 1960s. A four-story high, 32-ft diameter spray dryer with 5000 lb/hr capacity was installed in 1962.
Lawrence Radiation Laboratory awarded Coors a 2-year contract in 1963 to produce enriched urania-beryllia fuel elements for Project Pluto's Tory II-C nuclear ramjet engine, which increased employment by 230 to a then-record 1100 total. High-alumina ceramics replaced porcelain in many thermomechanical, electrical and chemical applications. Coors engineers invented fully dense, glass-free 99.5+% Al₂O₃ ceramics in 1964, useful for many applications where porcelain is deficient.^,
Growth in the 1970s enabled Coors to build the 150,000 ft² electronic ceramics Clear Creek Valley Plant east of Golden in 1970, and its first facility outside of Golden, an electronic substrate plant in Grand Junction, CO, in 1975. Coors made its first purchase of a competitor when it bought Wilbanks Inc. of Hillsboro, Oregon, in 1973. Two more competitors, Research Instrument Co. of Norman, Oklahoma, and Alumina Ceramics Inc. of Benton, Arkansas, were acquired in 1975 and '76, resp. Coors opened its first foreign factory in Glenrothes, Scotland, in 1981. Two more foreign subsidiaries were acquired in the early 1980s, an electronic ceramics plant in Singapore and a paper-tooling plant in Brazil. Coors began making silicon carbide, silicon nitride, spinel, zirconia and several other ceramic products by the mid-1980s.
Image:CoorsTek ceramics2.jpg|thumb|left|Figure 2: CoorsTek ceramic products. A Porcelain pestle; B Porcelain mortar; C Glazed porcelain casserole; D Glazed porcelain 100-mm long boat; E TTZ putter; F 99.8% alumina tray. Scale: the coin between E & F is a U.S. quarter.