By Jeanne Roberts

Coors Brewing Company of Golden, Colorado is a subsidiary of Molson Coors Brewing Company. The company's U.S. brands include Coors Light, Molson Canadian, Coors, Aspen Edge, Killian's Irish Red, Keystone, Blue Moon, Coors NA and Zima XXX. In 2005, Coors merged with Molson, a Canadian brewer, then with SABMiller, an international beer giant.

Coors, the third largest brewer in the U.S., used to boast its beer was brewed with pure Rocky Mountain spring water. In the 90’s, when Coors set up shop in Virginia, Anheuser Busch and the ATF made them change the slogan. Coors labels and ads still refer to the Rockies and its water, but they don’t mention “pure” or “spring”. Given the evidence that follows, this comes as no surprise. Any springs left in the Denver/Golden region are contaminated beyond recovery and Coors knows it, having put many of the contaminants there itself.

Between 1989 and 1991, Coors was cited 39 times by the Colorado Dept. of Health, which called Coors “one of the state’s worst polluters”. In 1991, Coors launched its “Pure Water 2000” campaign, giving $600,000 to groups and individuals dedicated to cleaning up streams and rivers. This included the National Geographic Society, which backs the Freshwater Initiative. I guess, when one has polluted water to the extent Coors has, a cover like the Freshwater Initiative is a good choice, if not an ethical one.

That same year, 1991, Coors agreed to pay $750,000 in fines for pumping contaminated waste water into Clear Creek and subsequently killing about 10,000 fish. A Coors spokesman said the release was accidental, but environmentalists said it represented the disparity between the company’s environmental claims and its actual behavior. A separate investigation, which revealed that Coors plant officials had knowingly concealed leaking pipes at the company’s canning plant, resulted in chemical solvents leaching into underground springs. The game was up when residents started experiencing arrhythmias, unconsciousness, pulmonary edema and death. The National Toxics Campaign reports that these solvents are still causing low birth weights and early childhood cancers in the area.

A branch of Coors that made nuclear fuel rods for the Atomic Energy Commission in the 60s, and stored liquid radioactive wastes at both the now-decommissioned Rocky Flats site and the Lowry Landfill, is equally guilty. Rocky Flats has supposedly been cleaned up, but the Lowry site is an ongoing nightmare whose toxic wastes have leached into the area’s groundwater. On Sept. 8, 2007, Adrienne Anderson, the coordinator for the Nuclear Nexus Project, attended the Denver City Park News Conference and reported that these leachates were the direct cause of the dead ducks in Denver lakes, specifically Sloan’s Lake. The ducks drowned because solvents stripped their feathers of the natural oils needed to keep the ducks afloat. The Lowry Landfill, which harbors more than 130 million gallons of liquid wastes – some radioactive, some merely toxic – also contains thousands of gallons of solvents which Coors used to clean the company’s enormous beer vats.

Hundreds of fish have also turned up dead on the shores of Sloan’s Lake. The experts say the die-off was caused by reduced oxygen levels during winter. An Internet poster known only as Toxic Sleuth says the die-off was caused by opening the Rocky Mountain Ditch, which originates at the Coors brewery in Golden. This Ditch was opened sometime in October to let more water into Sloan’s, an artificial lake that has no natural water supply. Other sources confirm that these fish kills have become commonplace downstream of the Coors brewery in the past few decades. Coors has not commented. Various agencies attending the Denver City Park conference promised an investigation into the cause, but the results so far have been an ominous and resounding silence. Neither the Rocky Mountain News nor the Denver Post (which are, for all intents and purposes, a single paper owned by the Denver Newspaper Agency) has stepped up to the bat on behalf of concerned residents.

In 2002, the Coors brewery ranked right up there with the most toxic facilities in the U.S., scoring a solid 70-80 percent for its ammonia releases. Ammonia affects the gastrointestinal system, liver, nervous system, reproductive system, and respiratory system, and is one of the most hazardous chemicals known to man. Coors 2006 ammonia releases were equally spectacular.

In 2007, Coors – which had been blending and bottling beer at the Shenandoah Brewery near Elkton, Virginia, but not brewing it – wangled an expansion permit for this facility from the Virginia State Water Control Board. Shenandoah Riverkeeper, an activist group, argued that the facility was in fact new construction, not an expansion, and should be permitted accordingly. The authorities ignored this logic, and Coors is now licensed to dump an additional 5 million gallons of effluent into an already troubled and no longer scenic stretch of the Shenandoah, one of America’s historic rivers. That this 6 millions gallons is 3.5 million gallons more than the plant’s existing design flow capacity is equipped to handle appears to have escaped the attention of regulators.

Coors not only pollutes water, but has twice – in the 70’s and 80’s – stopped a can and bottle recycling initiative brought before the Colorado legislature. This effort cost Coors millions of dollars, and has resulted in millions of bottles and cans littering Colorado’s otherwise scenic vistas, including its streams, which fishermen traditionally use to cool the beer.

The company’s fierce, ongoing opposition to unionized labor costs them nothing but the veiled animosity of their Miller counterparts, who are unionized. Coors, right-wing to the core, started and funds the Castle Rock Foundation, which pays groups like the American Enterprise Institute to produce white papers based on pseudo-science which support energy industry policies.

As we all know, the energy industry is not vested in either environmentalism or worker’s rights. It is vested in making a buck off the sweat of middle-class Americans (the most endangered species on the planet). If you lose your home because you can’t pay the mortgage and the electric bill – and still buy gas to get to work and back, too bad for you. The energy industry is making out like a bandit.

Speaking of energy, on February 21, 2008, Xcel Energy gave Coors $138,000 in rebates for energy conservation at its facilities. It gave similar rebates to the Denver Newspaper Agency (mentioned previously), the Oppenheimer Fund, Wal-Mart and King Soopers. It gave nothing to homeowners. The only way a homeowner can get a rebate check from Xcel is to spend $10,000 on a renewable energy system, like solar. Even then, the money doesn’t come out of Xcel’s pockets, but from the federal government. Xcel, which operates in Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota and Wisconsin, recently announced rate increases in both Wisconsin and New Mexico after a year of record-breaking profits.

One final concern no one has mentioned – Coors Light labels now use thermochromatic ink (which changes the mountains from white to blue as the beer chills). Everyone who drinks bottled beer knows the labels come off in water, either in a cooler or in a stream, and eventually find their way into water supplies. Unlike regular colored ink, which is only mildly toxic, thermochromatic ink contains divinyl and fluoran leucodyes, amidophenols, anilides, acids (like toluene sulfide), aminotriarylmethane compounds, and possibly even deuterium. All these lovely, lethal chemicals sound like a truly winning combination, and may add entire ecologies – including consenting adults – to Coor’s current head count of dead ducks, dead fish, and cancerous children.

God only knows what’s in the Coors insulating label, but we probably don’t want that in the water either.